


Gaps and Place Holders

by Entscheidungsproblem



Series: We Fill This Space [1]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canon compliant-ish, Dorks in Love, F/M, Shepard is super dense, introspection--lots of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-04-22 02:26:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14298747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Entscheidungsproblem/pseuds/Entscheidungsproblem
Summary: You know that annoying shit that just hangs out at the tip of your tongue and you don't even know what it is? Worse than a fucking mindworm. Worse than some random word that you need for something but can't remember what. No, much worse. It's that sharp, round, sticky thing perpetually on the verge of..something. It never does anything, it's just there. Until it hits you.





	1. Vega Goes In For The Kill

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mordinette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mordinette/gifts).



> ...who got this story started; ever patient and generous with her time.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James Vega notices things.

“Scars.”

Garrus turned around, sipping kava from his mug. It was piping hot, just the way he preferred it. Except the _Normandy_ was kept so cold that it would be undrinkable by the time he sets it down on his desk. So he wasn’t going to let Vega interrupt his enjoyment of it.

“Hm?” he said instead, and kept walking. He flicked a mandible inquisitively and took another sip.

“Listen,” Vega said, walking in pace with the turian. “Can you smell people?”

“Uh...what?”

“You know, smell people,” Vega waved his hands, tracing circles in the air towards his face. “Not just humans, I mean people...when they’re sick or angry,” he went on, pausing before adding “Or in the room.”

Garrus was confused by the line of questioning. But he had become familiar with Vega; he was unique among his human crewmates. He was insatiably curious. He’d already spent enough late nights in the shuttle bay just chatting with him and Cortez. Mostly they talked about weapons and hardware but conversations often turned towards the little tidbits that made the differences between the species hilarious and weird. He also knew enough to expect that, to Vega, no topic was sacred. He pushed wherever his curiosity took him. Although he was not exactly slow, Garrus could actually just sit back and watch him visibly processing new information.

“Watch this,” Cortez elbowed him one time. It was already late, but none of them felt like turning in. Garrus had referred to his Widow as “brother”. Humans, it turned out, often thought of their weapons as "baby". That opened the topic of pregnant turian women. A common misconception among humans was that turians laid eggs and sat on them. He had to explain that turians were born, not hatched. Vega’s face was shifting minutely as his brain hopped from one thought to another, making the necessary connections. His frown was at once deepening and then disappearing while his chin twitched thoughtfully. It was comical and endearing at the same time. It made Garrus feel oddly protective of the hulking little human.

“Oh,” Vega said, when he finally emerged from that one. “Are there premature turian babies?”

That remark led to a long conversation about turian gestation. He had to carefully explain _kh'then_ , the point very early in a pregnancy at which turian biology determined whether a fetus was healthy and discarded it if not. Apparently, humans sometimes carried pregnancies to term and gave birth to what they called stillborn infants. He was horrified by the idea; it was both wasteful and unnecessarily traumatic. That conversation lasted so long, all three of them were zombies from lack of sleep the following morning.

Vega had the same academic inquisitiveness Liara had but none of the hesitation that came with her guilt for appearing to treat people like lab specimen. Unlike almost the entire crew of the Normandy, however, Vega seemed to have zero interest in using the extranet if the subject wasn’t about porn. He liked his information first-hand. And he blurted out questions like toothpaste squirting out of the tube that someone just stepped on. Generally harmless but that fart noise could still sometimes sound very wrong.

Nevertheless, when Vega asked him questions about any variety of subjects, Garrus knew he could be reasonably sure he was drawing out information, not laying down a trap. It was always fun watching the angle from which the human approached any topic and then eventually circled around to what he really wanted to learn.

“C’mon, scars,” Vega pressed. “Can you?”

“Oh,” Garrus said, snapping back into focus. “Hm.” He paused, tapping the mug with a finger. “The ability varies from turian to turian, the way all humans can hum but not everyone can sing very well,” he said finally and resumed walking towards the battery. “But in general, yeah, I can smell people.”

“So if someone was, say, on their way into the mess hall, you can smell them?” Vega was being very persistent and, worryingly, hard to follow.

“James, I don’t sniff out every room unless I’m on a mission,” Garrus assured him, giving up the prospect of enjoying his morning kava in silence and solitude. “Even then, what I can detect depends on a number of factors. Like the amount of compounds being released, and whether I am hyper-alert at the moment.”

Vega considered this carefully, brows knotting.

“Huh,” he said. “You can turn it on and off?”

“To a point,” Garrus replied.

“Can you smell it if I’m happy or pissed?” he asked. “I mean, how pissed or happy do I have to be before you can tell just by sniffing?”

Garrus laughed. “Oh, Jimmy. You spew so indiscriminately I can tell when you’re about to be hungry long before you realize you are.”

“For real?” Vega said, momentarily distracted. “Huh.”

“I have to cover my nose just to give you privacy,” Garrus snickered.

“You calling me smelly, Scars?”

“Yes.”

They were at the entrance of the battery now and as he reached for the control panel. Vega pushed again, ignoring the taunt. “So, you’re that good, huh?” he asked, undeterred.

“Well, no,” Garrus replied. “I’m just more familiar with you than some random batarian merc. If I have a baseline, I can better sense deviations from your normally bubbly self.”

“So, can you tell what anyone is feeling at any given moment?” Vega asked. Garrus was getting suspicious, all his baits were being judiciously ignored. But that last question made him stop. It was an interesting question, actually. He thought about how to explain it.

Frankly, he felt a little sorry for humans. Their evolution must have been an expensive affair if they had to give up their olfactory senses in exchange for whatever it was they gained for it. It was probably the reason most of the older races considered humans brash and loud. Everything they did had to be brash and loud, from the way they walked to the kind of soap they used on their fringes. The poor creatures could not smell or even hear for shit if their lives depended on it. How were they not extinct?

“There are differences between races and then more differences between individuals,” he began.

“Oh yeah? Like how?”

“Well.” He stood back, gulping down a large sip of kava (ugh it was cold already). “Most species often just release other signaling compounds to mask others. Humans and drell are very similar—I think you may actually be able to control your primary signaling.”

“You mean, instead of throwing off happy smells, we just throw off less pissy smells?” Vega asked, head tilting to one side.

“Well, better than that,” Garrus said. “I think you actually make yourselves less pissed.”

This made Vega smile. “Wow, we’re kinda cool, huh," he said, grinning wider.

“You’re certainly more transparent than you think you are,” Garrus replied, palming the door to the main battery. But Vega was not done, apparently.

“What about if you’ve tagged someone you just generally want to know if they’re somewhere or on their way or whatever?” he asked.

Garrus finally turned to face him. He couldn’t even begin to parse that question.

“What the hell are you talking about, Vega?”

The man’s face was an odd combination of genuine curiosity and challenge. That was alarming, Garrus thought. Vega was getting at something and he was worryingly successful at being obtuse.

The door opened and Garrus went into the battery, setting his now dead kava on the desk, and waiting for some kind of explanation. Vega just stood at the entrance, his arms crossing over his chest as he leaned against the side.

“She won’t notice you’re avoiding her if you’re gone from the room by the time she steps in,” he finally said.

Garrus’ jaw went slack. The gears inside his head slammed to a halt and were having a hard time restarting. It took a few seconds and a few false starts before they slowly started to re-engage. Vega was looking at him, refusing to yield.

“Uh-huh,” Vega said, nodding. “There you go. Keep thinking, you’re getting there.”

“I…uh...”

It was a weird place to be for Garrus; his mind slowing down to a crawl while Vega watched him piece the information together, nodding patiently like an indulgent parent.

“Uh...” He had the beginning of a retort but lost it immediately. He had now crossed the boundary straight into the territory of stupid.

Vega shook his head. How about that, a screwed turian guy looked just like a screwed human guy.

“Bro, all I'm saying is if you're trying to make a point, you gotta wait for her to be in the room before you make it,” Vega said gently, straightening up and walking slowly backwards. “We can’t smell stuff the way you can. She won’t know you just left the room on her account. To her, you’d just be not there.”

Vega did not have any kind of flair for the dramatic. He was a straightforward sort of man and his brain just did not operate that way. So when he took a final step back and gave him a mock salute before reaching for the door panel, he really just needed to be going.

“For the record, I think you’re both wasting time,” he said as the door closed.


	2. Spinning Turian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Humans. It isn't that simple._

Two hours later, Garrus was still pacing in the main battery, his mind oscillating between being completely flooded and going completely blank. _Vega._ Spirits. The bastard had scrambled his brain just as he was finally getting a grip. He was most definitely not trying to make a point of anything. What he had in mind was exactly the opposite: keep his head down, tiptoe around the periphery and not disturb anything while he figured out his moment. He hadn’t counted on anyone actually watching while he did it. And it had to be Vega? Well. That was just great.

Wasting time? _Both_ of them? What did that mean? He didn’t know, his brain was swirling and Garrus was pretty sure swirling was not one of things his brain should be doing. His knees felt weak—another alarming notion. Giving up, he draped his body across the console, allowing the release of a low agonized rumble as he tried to think underneath all the brain-swirling.

“Spirits,” he whispered to himself. This was not good. Vega was not the most astute of his crewmates but if even he had started to notice something, other more incisive and less discreet observers definitely had an inkling by now too. Liara, definitely. Samara, if she was on _Normandy_ and cared. He was not sure if EDI could put the pieces together but it was so logical to him that the unshackled AI had probably already assigned varying degrees of probabilities to it. Except EDI was bound by privacy clauses and that was some relief. He had no worries about Shepard herself; she was as dense as krogan bread, if it existed (it didn’t). She wouldn’t notice a damn thing.

Garrus had been inside a thick mental fog since he stepped back into the _Normandy_ ; the blast of cold air had done nothing to lift the haze he himself had so carefully built after his return to Palaven. The mental fog thickened even more when he stationed on Menae. After Shepard surrendered to the Alliance, the entire _Normandy_ crew had fanned out, each one of them unlimbed by the loss of their commander for the second time. He needed that mental fog, he needed the insulation in order to function.

Then, when news of the Reaper attack on Earth reached him, he just flat out decided to believe that Shepard was not dead. His mind absolutely _insisted_ on it, loudly refusing to consider other more plausible outcomes. When Palaven in turn came under siege, that single mooring thread had allowed him to jump from one horror to another in order to prepare for the bigger ones still coming. No way was he going to even entertain the suggestion that Commander Fucking Shepard could have been killed on Earth. That’d be just crazy talk.

By the time Garrus spotted the tell-tale Shepard-shape on Menae, even before he heard her actual voice, he had convinced himself so thoroughly that it didn’t surprise him she was alive. He didn’t even feel relief. Of course she was alive, exclamation point. He’d insisted on it, hadn’t he.

Unfortunately, just because it didn’t surprise him didn’t mean he wasn’t ecstatic. When she turned to look at him, only the surrounding explosions saved him from the complete humiliation of so audibly thrumming within earshot of his own men. He had reached for her hand and held it with both of his. He ignored the pang of guilt he felt when the rush of utter joy washed over him, followed by deep gratitude; even as his own planet burned on the horizon.

The flurry of activity that followed their evacuation from Menae left room for little else; the debriefing with the newly-minted Primarch Victus had been tense and his own despair, overpowering. There was no word of his father or sister and no way to send back word to either. During the conference with Hackett, the inevitable assessment of the combined turian and human standing forces opened the unwelcome view of how thin they had all become in the wake of overwhelming force. The one bright light that he jealously and selfishly appropriated for himself had been _her_. Just her. Even then...even then, he had hefted the weight of everything else, put them aside and thought only of the fact that Shepard was alive ( _alive!_ ) and flying the _Normandy_ with him in it.

“Garrus, you’re back!” Joker had almost lifted himself from his seat. “Did you bring your stick with you, big guy?”

“In the war room, meeting with Shepard,” he shot back without missing a beat, mandibles spreading wide as he sauntered into the cockpit.

That had the pilot laughing hysterically. The sound of it actually lifted Garrus’ mood a little. “I knew there was a reason you’re my best turian friend,” Joker said, spinning slowly in his seat.

“I’m your only turian friend, Joker,” Garrus returned.

“Yeah, I did say you have no equal, man,” Joker laughed, fist-bumping him—one of the uniquely human gestures that Garrus truly appreciated. He actually had to wean himself off of it on Palaven. Holding up a limp-wristed fist to hardened turian soldiers triggered only confusion.

“Hey, listen, sorry about Palaven,” the pilot said more quietly; he seemed uncomfortable but earnest.

“Eyes forward, Joker,” he replied. He even believed it himself. If they didn’t stop counting their losses, there’d be no time left to avoid taking more. Eyes forward.

“Right!” the flight lieutenant barked back in mock salute. “Hey, speaking of. You’ve seen Liara, right? Is it me or is she bluer?”

“I hadn’t noticed,”

“Oh phffth.” Joker added a redundant snort. “Shepard isn’t the only person on this ship, you know.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” he quipped. They had both laughed then.

Recalling the conversation now, Garrus pressed his forehead hard against the cold surface of the weapons console, exchanging blinks with the lights as the computer tried to sort through the commands his skull was randomly giving. _Gonna have to fix that later_. The hum of the main battery sounded like a cry for help to him; his cannons (his!) were vibrating like space hobos in need of food and shelter. He should feel energized by the desperate need for his calibrations but instead, he gripped his leg spurs tightly, trying to remember the many reasons why, as a turian, he couldn’t possibly be thinking what he was thinking. For starters, he had leg spurs. If that didn’t drive the damn point home, nothing else could.

Spirits. How did he even get into this situation?

Oh he knew how. Garrus had perfect recollection of that first inkling when he found himself dumbfounded; staring open-mouthed at Shepard. Her arm was outstretched, gun still smoking. Saleon was slumped on the floor, dead before his head even touched it. No one spoke, he could actually detect the breaks in the steady hum of the _MSV Fedele_.

“So he dies anyway. What was the point of that?” he had blurted. Because, what the hell. He had been tracking Saleon for months and yet he allowed Shepard to talk him out of shooting that damn creature. Then _she_ shot him.

Shepard didn’t even turn around to look at him when she spoke. “You can’t control how people will act, Garrus,” she said, holstering her weapon. He was fuming.

“But you can control how you will respond,” she finished, finally turning towards the door. “That’s what matters in the end.”

Whatever it was he was about to say screeched to a halt at the tip of his tongue. How was it that those words came out of Shepard’s mouth but he heard them in his father’s voice? As if that wasn’t weird enough, what really twisted his head around so that his brain spilled out was hearing Shepard say those very words while staring at the dead salarian on the floor. Passing through the Shepard lens, Castis Vakarian’s words operated in exactly the opposite direction. It was almost funny.

As she walked past him, Shepard threw him a look, her head tilting upwards. Wow, she was short, he remembered thinking. That had made it worse. This small human was somehow much bigger than him. By the time he regained control of his maw, Shepard was already at the door.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you, Commander,” he said softly, almost to himself. He noticed Alenko at that point, the Alliance soldier had an expression that made him groan inside. Thank the spirits for turian anatomy. If he had to look like that when he found his mate someday, he’d have to disassemble his own face and screw every piece back together to permanently disable it.

Hah!

 _Garrus Vakarian, you’re an idiot_ , said Solana’s voice in his head. He was seriously starting to hate his own brain. It was good when it worked but then, betrayal after betrayal.

He had forgotten that incident easily. But then, he was hit by the second Shepard wave; it had been less Die For The Cause and more Help I’m Drowning.

“Electromagnetic waves, do you think?” was what Shepard was saying that day on Noveria. He remembered every word of that conversation because he was blaming everything that happened next squarely on the Rachni queen. That was when his brain sold him out; making connections where none existed (or even should), and drawing pictures he was not expecting. The rest of his body just followed, ignoring evolution, biology, politics, social norms, wars and whole histories of entire civilizations!

“Uh. What?” he said stupidly, looking around at Liara T’soni. The asari was standing at the back of the tram as it careened into the ice on Aleutsk Valley. She was staring into the blizzard, looking outwardly calm. But the knuckles of her blue hand were white from how hard she was gripping the handrail. They were out of the blast radius on Peak 15 but still acutely aware that Matriarch Benezia was melting into the fire of the exploding laboratory behind them. He could tell the doctor was in a dark space; not the kind that people emerged from, eventually; but the kind people brought everywhere with them for the rest of their lives. For the asari, “the rest of their lives” was a very long time. He could already feel Liara pulling far, far away. Even the commander smelled worried.

Garrus looked back at Shepard. She was looking at him. Well. That meant this conversation was with him, then. Although he could not, for the life of him, figure out why. She sounded like she was already halfway through her mental calisthenics, it was unclear why he had to be involved. Busy day at work, they were all tired.

“It will have to be EM waves,” Shepard repeated, as if the statement was self-explanatory. She was speaking in a voice just loud enough for him to hear but low enough not to bother Dr. T’soni. “The Rachni communicate even through the vacuum of space and EM waves don’t require a medium,” she continued.

“Oh...Yeah. That would also explain how the queen could talk about both sound and color,” he said, thinking it over. “EM waves can encode anything. They just have to be able to convert the information into electric impulses that their brains can process.”

“She’s like a mothership with drones gathering input and performing operations,” Shepard agreed. “That means they have the ability to both transmit and receive EM waves, plus the ability to process the data either individually or collectively like parallel systems.”

“It’s entirely possible the queen handles all the processing, all the thinking,” Garrus said thoughtfully. This was interesting and even plausible. “That would make them a single organism with remote parts.”

 “The drones could have limited processing ability, too, with limited independence,” Shepard agreed, nodding. “Or they could be fully autonomous, just very disciplined.”

“If momma has remote access, she could slap them around remotely if they get too rambunctious,” he said, spreading his mandibles.

 Shepard grinned a little at the idea of rebellious rachni teenagers, her head tilting to one side. Human speech was flat but, spirits, their faces moved around _a lot,_ he thought to himself. He had learned from his C-Sec days to layer human speech over all that facial flexing, crunching and stretching. It was incredibly inefficient; he had to be looking at them when they spoke. But he found that doing that often revealed information that were sometimes deliberately obscured by their speech.

Commander Shepard was one of very few humans Garrus knew whose face did not contradict but instead mirrored and often even amplified what she was saying aloud. That tilt of the head, however, combined with a specific wrinkling of the skin between her eyebrows and the slight flexing of her mouthparts—that was an expression he had become familiar with since he first saw it on that tram. She was trying to understand something; she hadn't made up her mind. He wasn’t sure if anyone recognized that about her. If anything, he felt particularly proud that he did, especially if no one else had.

Garrus learned eventually that Shepard had a particular discomfort with small talk. She had conversations with people, but nearly always out of necessity and she always came away with more information than she gave. Maybe it was the military upbringing, or just her personality. There was no idle talk with the commander; she spoke only to advance the plot, as it were. Most of the time, she was quietly observing. When she did speak, it was as if she had a dialogue wheel calibrated specifically to pick seemingly unrelated bits of data that people didn’t realize she was extracting. Clever girl, he thought. His commander had a clever, clever mind.

That time on Noveria, though, Garrus did not know any of that. In that tram, he just gave in to the whiplash. She was weaving too fast, as if to see whether he could catch up.

“She clearly couldn’t detonate them herself, though, she needed us to destroy them for her,” Shepard was saying. It had surprised him, that expression on her face when she said that. He already knew she had a temper. After the episode with Saleon, he also knew she could be unapologetically ruthless. But just then, she looked...sad.

“Well, maybe just those ones,” he said. “She did say they were ‘lost to silence’ and couldn’t be saved. Maybe that meant she lost remote access.”

Shepard thought about this for a moment, looking into the deep space asymptotic to the floor with her brows furrowed together. Garrus realized she had him thinking about the rachni now, too. He was intrigued by the possibilities. They were the only known sentience that operated like a hive mind, or were at least suspected of it. No species in the galaxy had ever been _not_ at war with them, so no one really knew for sure. The real attraction, though, was rachni cohesion.

The humans were not alone in their fascination with mental communications or telepathy as they called it. Although overtly laughed at and ridiculed by scientists in nearly all the citadel species, it was still the wet dream of every military R&D. Not so much the woowoo, but practical use of mind-to-mind communication. And that did not mean like the asari mind-meld where individuals have to be in physical contact--that made it useless for military applications. But real, long-distance mental messaging. It was true the rachni could do it even through deep space. It wasn’t tech, either. They had evolved the anatomy for it. They must have all the organic, anatomical parts to make extremely long distance transmission possible. At least that was the assumption. The rachni could also have equipped themselves with technology no one else had so far been able to poke at. The very idea made him weak in the knees from excitement. If only he could talk to the queen again.

How would they even do it, Garrus wondered. The queen had needed a medium to speak with them. It could mean she did not have the ability to vocalize although they could hear her making _some_ noise while she spoke through the asari. It was also possible she was using the asari as a translator, not so much as a medium of communication. The queen might not necessarily need speech but she could definitely use language. She needed the vocabulary from the asari and he remembered her stopping once or twice before finally saying she could not find the words. Even her use of the words “color” and “music” could just be dim approximations of what she was trying to convey. Interesting.

“Maybe they didn’t even use language as we know it. If they’re mentally linked, they only need to exchange concepts. Language would be a redundant layer,” he said aloud. He was in the daze and excitement of rapidly forming ideas. When his eyes focused back on Shepard, she was looking back at him all teeth bared and eyes twinkling. Because he was an idiot, he was confused yet again. Why was she smiling? Spirits, it looked frightening the way humans pulled back their mouthparts like that. Their teeth were all flat, what was the point?

“Did you hear what I just said?” Shepard asked, chuckling at him.

“Uh, no? What did you just say?” he asked in a small voice, making her loose a snorting laugh.

“I said the rachni probably communicated with concepts, not words,” she said, a strange expression on her face. “She was using too many metaphors that sounded like place-holders for absent specifics.”

Oh. They were thinking the same thing.

Something in his chest skipped a beat. _What was that?_ The gap was followed by heavy thudding so loud in his ears he was afraid _she_ could hear it.

“I noticed that, too,” Liara spoke from the back of the tram, startling both of them. “I didn’t make the connection until you both pointed it out.” She was walking towards them, swaying a little with the vehicle racing through the track. Shepard shot him a look, and the barest trace of the smallest smile, mostly in her eyes.

“It’s not completely unheard of,” Liara continued as she settled on the seat closer to them, grasping a rail to steady herself. “The hanar used to be thought to communicate that way, expressing concepts and emotions without structured language most species are familiar with, like parts of speech or verb tenses, even object-specific nouns.”

“Used to be?” Shepard asked, glancing at him again.

The asari shifted in her seat, her hands clasped together on her lap. “Well, it’s not really my area so I can’t explain any of it well,” she said. “But you can tell a lot from a culture from the way their languages are structured. It gives you an idea of how they think. Missing words that are present in other languages, for example, could mean a particular species just do not think in certain ways and only in others.”

“For example, there is no native word in any turian language for lying,” Liara said, looking at Garrus with a shy smile.

“Sure there is,” he said.

“It isn’t native, it was a loan word from the asari, in fact. Dating less than a thousand year after first contact,” she pointed out.

“Turians don’t lie, Vakarian?” Shepard asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Sure we do,” he protested. “It’s just…considered distasteful and low.”

When he looked at her, Shepard was smiling at him again. Only this time, it didn’t strike him as frightening. It was really not a bad look, on her face. If he was asked to name it, he would have called it shiny; the way plants sparkled fresh and clean when bright sunlight followed a short burst of pouring rain.

For the second time that day, his heart skipped another beat.

“Anyway, it turned out the hanar did have what we recognize as a language structure,” Liara went on. “It was just that their vocabulary included words that represented whole bodies of ideas or complete storyboards of events instead of discrete meanings that you can then mix up to form ideas and narrate events.”

Garrus tried to grasp the notion; damn, translating words like that would be tricky.

“So who actually speaks the way you’re describing, if not the hanar?” Shepard asked.

“Well,” Liara said. “The yahg.”

“The yahg?!” Garrus and Shepard exclaimed in unison.

For the remainder of the tram ride, Liara had tried to explain as much of what she knew as well as she could. In the end, the three of them had more questions than they started with. The asari did not seem to mind that they were picking her brain which gave both of them ideas for even more questions. By the time they reached Port Hanshan, Liara still looked exhausted, but the dark cloud had lifted from her eyes. Shepard and Garrus exchanged looks; they had done it. Together they held out a hand and Liara had taken it.

They did not tarry on Noveria and were back on the _Normandy_ that same day. Liara disappeared into her makeshift lab in the medbay and the rest of the crew quietly agreed to give her some space to mourn. Shepard did not seem as worried as she was when they first escaped on that tram.

Garrus, for his part, scampered back to the cargo bay, relieved to be able return to his normal routine. He spent a few minutes exchanging insults with Wrex who was actually sitting down reading a novel when he came in. The old krogan was a package of ludicrous surprises. If he turned out to own and use a damn loom or even knitting needles, it wouldn’t surprise him.

As he laid down his tools beside the Mako, however, Garrus felt his thoughts settling down. After a while, the comfortable odor of oil and grease, the heft of the wrench on his hand and idle musings about torque and hydraulic pressure finally set his mind back at ease.

Even now, more than three years later, Garrus was convinced that _that_ would have been the end of it. Nothing else would have remained out of place and everything that discombobulated him on Noveria could have been easily dismissed as a fleeting proto-infatuation. Someday, when he was a hundred years old, he would maybe remember and shudder a little while he looked fondly at his _turian_ bondmate. Yeah, that was definitely what would have happened.

As it turned out, that day was not done with him yet. While music blared in his ears, he felt someone kick his thigh. He was on the creeper under the Mako, trying to dislodge a panel. He twisted and craned his neck to look, struggling not to crack his cowl against the chassis. There was a pair of human feet near his legs.

“Take a break, Vakarian,” Shepard hollered, bending down to annoy him with a flashlight beam. Not since he was a boy, when his mother wheeled out of the birthing house with his new sister, could he remember being more giddy with exhilaration than that moment. He managed to still his breathing before pushing out from under the vehicle. But as soon as he saw her face, his chest started pounding again. It was only a few hours since they got back to the ship but she had looked as happy to see him as he felt seeing her.

“What’s going on, Commander,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Oh nothing,” Shepard answered, holding out one of his precious bottles of ale, the cheap kind.

“You broke into my locker?”

 “Like it was unhackable?”

“I didn’t think it would occur to anyone.” He didn’t really care. He took the bottle from her.

“I aim to serve,” she replied with a grin, popping the cap off her own beer. She liked the dark kind humans called “draft” beer, like it wasn’t done yet. Preliminary beer, subject to change.

Garrus swallowed nearly a quarter of his ale. He remembered watching as she swallowed, her throat bobbing up and down her woefully unprotected neck. He was thinking how easy it would be to snap that neck just by reaching out as he walked by without even breaking his stride. To his surprise, the thought had the opposite effect. It didn’t make him feel powerful, it made him feel protective and thus vulnerable because of it. _Gah_.

“So, do turians lie or not?” Shepard asked, climbing on top of the crate he was using as a table. She was padding around the ship barefooted. Humans were weird.

“Oh we lie, we just can’t make it stick,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” She seemed unconvinced. Was lying so fundamental to human society that they were unable to conceive it being impossible for other species? “Try me,” she said.

“Uh...what?”

“Come on, tell me a lie,” she pressed.

“Like what?”

“Whatever! Tell me I’m pretty.” She was enjoying his slow, irreversible dismemberment.

“Hah!” Wrex erupted from across the loading bay, followed by a loud bark of throaty laughter. Shepard glared at the krogan but she was smiling from one corner of her mouth.

“Alright.” Garrus pulled up to his full height, wiping his hands with a greasy towel. “You’re a better shot than I am.”

“Oh fuck you, Vakarian!” Shepard threw her head back and laughed. “Asshole. Fuck you very thoroughly!”

To his utter horror, Garrus felt his plates shift.

 


	3. R&D

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"It's just sex, everyone does it," she said._

Garrus was positive he thought about it first. But when push came to shove, it was Shepard who hauled the whole elephant into the room, dropped it on the floor, pointed at it and said “Look!”.  By that time, he had become an entirely different man. The hunt for Saren had diminished into a small episode in the dim past somewhere and he was privately mourning the loss of his people on Omega. He had no room for anything else.

The crew of the Normandy had given him his space and even Shepard kept her distance for a time. But, of course, she could only tolerate that for so long. His face wasn't even healed yet but when he was finally off the painkillers, of course, she picked that moment to spring _that_ on him. He, on the other hand, just went spinning again.

_Her irises are perfect circles. Twenty-two units of circumference for every seven units of diameter. Human eyeballs are squishy, aren’t they? Is that why they freak her out? Why is the white part not the same color as the iris in the middle? I should probably stop looking at it like I want to pluck it out. What’s it stuck to, anyway?_

“Garrus?”

“Oh!”

_How had turian sparring led to this conversation? I should say something!_

“I didn’t... Hmm. Never knew you had a weakness for men with scars.” _Smooth. Sufficiently tangential without escaping out of the varren pit altogether. Is that a smirk or a smile? I can’t look._ He turned away.

“Well, why the hell not? There’s nobody in this galaxy I respect more than you...” _Shit, is respect weird? Why are the eyebrows up?_ “If we can figure out a way to make it work, then... Yeah, definitely.”

Shepard’s smirk/smile did not change. His visor showed an elevation in body temperature and racing heartbeat. And, beyond the secret features of his visor but not his own senses, a faint tendril of a new scent curling away gently just below the strong odor of the glycerol in her soap; it was strongest as she walked past him, her eyes never leaving his face.

As soon as the door closed, Garrus turned into an abandoned wet towel draped carelessly across the weapons console. Alarms blared. The side of his face had triggered his test launch sequence and his system was complaining that the missile bay was, in fact, empty.

“It’s okay, EDI! Bumped something by accident,” he said as calmly as he could, aborting the faulty launch.

“Very well, Officer Vakarian. Logging you out,” EDI replied. He could swear there was a snicker in her tone.

The next time they talked about it, they worried about mechanics. Shepard suggested without thinking that they check out human-turian porn. She sounded so matter-of-fact that he was roped into the indifference of it. Except, after minutes of typing silently on their datapads, they found out there was no such thing as human-turian porn.

“This is ridiculous; we can’t be the only ones to ever do it,” she said, sounding irritated.

“We’re not even that yet,” he mumbled.

Shepard wasn’t listening, though; the project had her locked in, not to be distracted. She fired out several more searches, going into several darknets, including one she had to bully EDI into letting her access.

“Look, EDI, Vakarian will just go around you and you'll spend the next few hours trying to stop him, so you might as well,” she said. EDI allowed them access but insisted on locking them up in a sandbox, isolated from the rest of the ship’s system. There was nothing there either.

“What the hell,” Shepard said.

“Well, we can watch human porn and then turian porn,” Garrus suggested.

“Human porn is just a bunch of people having sex.”

“So is turian porn. What's your point?”

“I'm not that cool about it,” she said, entirely uncontaminated with the awkward embarrassment that would have immobilized him.

“Come on, Vakarian,” she said, plucking something out from her back pocket. “We’ve come up with genius tactics and navigated through icky politics together, we can sort this out.” She tore the wrapper from a fruit bar and stuffed the whole thing in her mouth.

“It’s just sex, everybody does it,” she added, the half-chewed bar pushing out of her left cheek.

“Well, with the first one, you basically just barrel through chokepoints while I watch your six; the second is mostly you hanging up on the Council while I snigger,” he replied. “As for the third, I think we’re actually inventing the market for human-turian porn right now.”

“How about you just show me what you got?” she suggested, patting down her cargo pants in search of another fruit bar. When she looked up at him, he was blue in the face. “What?” she asked, frowning.

“Now?”

“Or you can draw it,” she said, eyes large and round.

“I’m not going to draw my junk for you, Shepard.”

“Junk?” She looked surprised. “When did you start using human slang?”

“Jack,” he replied, already distracted. He had decided that, in the absence of smut, clinical was clearly the way to go. He was looking for some basic diagram of the human anatomy. Shepard looked over his shoulder at his datapad. “Oh, good idea,” she said, nodding.

They were quiet for a while until Shepard let out a soft “What the actual fuck?” under her breath.

“Where _is_ your junk?” she exclaimed.

Garrus reached for her datapad to see what she was looking at. “That’s an advertising spread for body tattoos, Shepard.” Her search term was “naked turian hunks.”.

“And anyway, behind the plates. They open when aroused and it comes out.”

Shepard stared at him in disbelief. “Well,” she began. “What am I supposed to do, knock?”

It was a rough start.

For maybe the first few minutes, it had bothered Garrus how quickly he eased out of depression and into the sheer excitement of anticipating _her_. It crossed his mind that Shepard probably intended exactly that. After Sidonis, he had preempted all future discussions, and she never pressed. She let him withdraw into himself while maintaining a respectable distance—just far enough not to crowd but close enough to reach in. He was grateful for the space; appreciated how she understood that where humans liked to spend a lot of time discussing their most private emotions with random passersby, turians were intensely private and stoic about theirs.

Garrus had nothing to sort out, though; he didn’t think any of it was complicated. He had lost people who were, for a time, his entire world. He didn’t feel he had grieved enough for nearly long enough. The splatter of distilled anger was still smeared like an artwork of panic that blurred his vision too often and too quickly. But even that was only a tool now, just part of his arsenal that became useful when he needed it. All of it dimmed against Shepard.

Moreover, he discovered to his surprise that the only cause of his hesitation with Shepard had been the assumption that she harbored no interest in him other than _crew_ and _comrade_. When she pissed on that assumption, it turned out he was fish to her water; in addition to a whole slew of other similes and half a dozen metaphors that did not translate,; none of them was about just blowing off steam.

It was no surprise, either, that Shepard did what she always did—probed, talked, and sometimes debated with him. Even then, nothing about the turian concept and practice of blowing off steam seemed to confuse or faze her. Garrus could tell, though, that she sensed his discomfort. Because she was Shepard, her solution was to help him sort himself out. She brought it up at random times with no hint of awkwardness or even any sense of timing, really; most inconveniently, always when he was in the middle of coding new firing algorithms into the Normandy’s weapons system.

“Hey, turian hunk!” she hollered, sauntering into the main battery. There was a loud clank of heavy metal as the pin spanner wrench slipped out of Engineer Donnelly’s hands and dropped into the inaccessible gap between the hydraulic fluid tank and the back-up missile loader. A staccato of untranslatable expletives followed.

“Oof, I’m going to need a fishing rod to get that out of there,” Donnelly mumbled, leaning over the tight space between the missile transfer bay and the back-up motor. “Evenin’, Commander.”

“Donnelly! Didn’t know you were here,” Shepard said cheerily, doing a good job of covering up her momentary surprise. She walked over to the loading conveyor and leaned over the railing, watching Donnelly try to reach for the dropped wrench with another wrench. Garrus leaned over next to her, almost touching. It was barely a shadow of a reaction, but he caught it—a minuscule wave of gentle heat rushing upwards from Shepard. Then, he realized, the engineer noticed it too. Furthermore, he didn’t care.

“We’re replacing the transfer clamp module,” Garrus explained. “The whole weapons system is turian in design but for some reason, Cerberus decided to use human fabrications in some parts.”

“Are they broken?”

“No, but the error margins I’m getting are too wide., I think it’s because of metal fatigue in the bushings they used in the holding clamps,” he replied. “We decided it wasn’t a good idea to replace the bushings, so we just replaced the whole module.”

Shepard blinked.

“Okay,” Garrus started. “To get to the loading bay, the Thanix missile has to be transferred from the magazine there and moved to the loading dock here before sliding into the firing bay there. If the clamp holding it is not precise, there will be an offset big enough that my algorithm can’t correct for it consistently. The first fix has to be mechanical.”

“We’re replacing the part that locks the missile onto the carriage that then loads it to the firing bay,” Donnelly piped in, adding almost to himself, “Never would’ve thought to look at that one.”

“Then we’re installing strips of palladium on these two sides here so when it drops in, it doesn’t roll as much. Let the ship’s gravity do some work for us.” When the engineer looked up at Shepard, he was definitely beaming.

“Aren’t there positioning clamps to hold it down in the firing bay?” Shepard asked. Donnelly looked surprised, but he had no idea how much Garrus talked about the Thanix system with Shepard.

“Yes, sir!” he said, grinning widely. “But Garrus thinks the tiny wiggle in the loading system was nudging it too much.”

“It was the only segment giving me erratic readings,” Garrus explained. “Nothing outside the tolerances but the inconsistency was bugging me.”

Shepard couldn’t help rolling her eyes. These two could go on for hours, and she’d never get a word in edgewise. “And these are standard turian military parts you’re putting in?” she said, raising a hand to interrupt before Donnelly could say anything.

“Well.”

Shepard crossed her arms and looked first at Garrus and then at Donnelly.

“Our weapons system hasn’t been standard for a while now, Commander,” the engineer said, standing up. “It’s now officially a prototype.”

“What he means is that we’ve improved it so much it’s no longer just the Thanix 1.0. We’ve skipped 2.0 and went straight to 3.0,” Garrus said proudly.

“Vakarian, did you just try to spin me around?” Shepard asked, frowning.

“Um, that’s really what we did, Shepard.”

“That means, what, exactly? Margin of error to the seventh decimal place instead of six?”

“Oh, better than that, Commander. We’re correcting from four to eight decimal places!” Donnelly was practically glowing now. “Officer Vakarian diagnosed it, I just came in to help him fix it.”

“He found the Alliance schematics; that’s how we know it was a crap part.” Donnely and Garrus were looking at each other, both grinning widely.

“You two need a room?” Shepard chuckled.

“Oh, I don't think I stand a chance, Commander,” Donnelly said knowingly.

Raising an eyebrow, Shepard walked to the door to leave but turned around just outside. “Just make sure you both tick the box that says ‘Standard Thanix Upgrade’ in your documentation and attach the details in the comments that hopefully no one will read,” she said. “I want the record but not the scrutiny.”

Taking a couple of steps backs, Shepard was still shaking her head when the door closed. As she turned, the door opened again and Garrus slammed into her in surprise, knocking her off balance with his momentum. But he caught her, arms holding her steady. The shock of the contact made them both blackout for a split- second. When he let go, though, he did it slowly. Because he didn’t want to.

“Did you need something?” he said in a low voice.

“Oh,” she said, momentarily confused. “Oh, not really. I brought you a tennis ball.”

Shepard took the fruit out of her pocket and held it out. It was a turian military staple—a legume-like seed from a Palaveni tree with an impossible name—very high in fat and protein. Turians had high base metabolic rates, and they needed to eat almost constantly. Fortunately for Garrus, he loved this seed and had laughed the first time he saw an actual tennis ball, finally getting the joke that humans in C-Sec were always making. The seed was the same size, and had similar swirling lines on the surface. Shepard liked the nutty flavor, too, but it gave her an unfortunate bout of explosive diarrhea when she first tried it.

“Are you about to go to bed?” he asked, heart starting to race when her eyes widened ever so slightly.

“Why? Are you coming up later?” she asked almost as quickly.

“Uh.” The hesitation in his voice—multiple layers of it—made Shepard wince.

“Hey, no pressure! That’s not what I meant,” she said, holding up the tennis ball. Garrus’ mandibles were locked firmly against his face. She sighed.

“Look, Garrus.” She took a step towards him, eyes not leaving his face. “If you’re not comfortable with this, it’s okay. I can deal.” She was convinced her voice was steady, but she didn’t have Garrus’ hearing.

“No!” he said hurriedly and louder than he intended. “I’m more than okay with it. Not what I meant at all. I just...” he paused, swiveling his visor away from his eye,. “...get nervous with you.”

“C’mon, Garrus,” she teased, slapping his arm with the back of her hand. “I’ve seen you swagger into a bar and heads would turn just from the way you swing your arms. You know you’re hot, right?”

“Heh. You said I was ugly.”

Shepard looked like she was puzzling through that one—not sure if he was joking or acknowledging that no human meeting a turian for the first time was ever able to keep themselves from screaming. 

“Seriously? I was angry!” she said, almost whispering in exasperation. “I thought the rocket killed you.” She pushed against his chest with the tennis ball.

“The Alliance has a lot of rules against fraternization,” Garrus heard himself say. Half of him (the loose-canon half) was strangling the other half (the straight-laced one). But a clanking noise in the battery made him turn his head towards the door. Donnelly was probably trying and failing to recover his wrench. _That is why_.

“I don’t want to disturb the crew too much.”

“Did you write all that down in a list somewhere, Vakarian?” She sounded incredulous.

“And neither of us ever had intercourse outside our species, Shepard,” he almost hissed, ignoring what she clearly thought was a rhetorical question. Inside his head, Loose Cannon Garrus picked up Straight Lace Garrus and slammed him against the floor, pummeling him violently with his foot to make him shut up. Then, the look on Shepard’s face made him grimace. “That sounded dirty like some kind of fetish,” he mumbled almost to himself.

“I could practice with Thane and you do Samara,” Shepard said, crossing her arms across her chest the way she did when he was being obtuse.

“You want to recruit the most lethal hunters in the galaxy for test runs?”

She surprised him by laughing. The whole conversation was spiraling out of control. His double-take, for instance, came from way north of stupid.

“Hang on, you want to do Thane?”

Shepard pretended to consider it seriously. “Even you think he’s hot,” she said, rubbing her chin with a sneer, until the next obvious thought struck her: “You’d do Samara?”

“She’d peel me alive. Slowly.”

“That’s your _only_ problem with that?”

“I’m also afraid I’ll squish you.” Loose Canon Garrus let rip an open-handed slap across the side of Straight Lace Garrus’ head.

Shepard shrugged indifferently. “I can be on top.”

As far as suggestions go, it was practical and straightforward. But the visuals reduced both Garrus halves into a quivering, inarticulate mess. When he failed to form words into sentences, Shepard cocked her head to the side and smirked.

“Are you done?” she asked.

Loose Canon Garrus was winning, holding the other half of him in a death grip, but that half was able to say,“But you can always back out, if you want.”. Loose Canon Garrus kicked him back down.

“I don’t!” she retorted. “Wait, do you?”

“No!” both of his warring halves shot back just as quickly. “Spirits, are we crazy?” His two halves merged there, too, both sides wondering the same thing.

“Of course we are,” she said, giving him a couple of placating pats on the chest. Garrus captured her hand on impulse before she could withdraw. It dawned on him that, just as Shepard always did in a fight, she was rushing the corridor while he held back watching her six.

“I don’t want to rush, Shepard. It’s not something I want to do just to get it over with. We’ll find our moment,” he said. “You know me, I like to savor the last shot before popping the heat sink.” The words came out before he could stop them. _Spirits, kill me now._ He’d bang his head on the floor but Shepard was in the way and laughing again. Finally, he just gave up.

“Listen,” he said, grabbing her hand on impulse. “I don’t care about everything I just said. I’m only bringing them up to make sure you don’t either.”

“I don’t.” The certainty in Shepard’s tone allowed the Garrus Halves to congeal. Then he was just Garrus at last.

“Okay, I’ll let you get back to whatever that is in there,” she said, pulling back her hand slowly and handing him the fruit. She looked up at him, as if to make sure he was done, absently clasping her hands together against her chin.

“Shepard, did I hurt your hand?”

“What?” she said, startled. “No, it’s fine.” When she turned to leave, her hands were still clasped together against her chest, and she was wondering why it hurt. It didn’t, not really. But she _was_ unbalanced by how warm and unwaveringly firm Garrus’ hand had felt around hers, even while he was being incoherent. The thought made her drop her arms to her sides with a look of guilt, and she brisk-walked the rest of the way to the elevator without looking back.

The next time the subject came to the table, it was Garrus who brought it up.

“Your ribs don’t connect to your hipbone,” he remarked, handing over the jar of washers. Shepard emptied the contents on the table, searching for the right size she needed for the holster clip.

“You don’t have any,” she returned.

“I have a nice, sturdy carapace. You have a gap of about five inches of unprotected spine,” Garrus mumbled, blowing sharply at the thin tentacle of smoke rising from the soldering gun. “I can break you across my knee.”

Shepard paused with a faraway look on her face. “ _You_ can,” she concluded. “Anyone else, I’d kill first or die before they get me across their knee.”

They were quiet for a while as Garrus pondered this. Then he looked up again. “Your rib cage breaks at 742 psi,” he pointed out.

Shepard stood up and clipped her pistol into the holster on her side. She gave it a wiggle. Then she moved her legs to and fro to see whether it was still moving around. “So try to stay under 700 psi,” she said dryly.

“Your ribs need room to expand when you breathe,” he insisted.

“Stay off my damn ribs then,” Shepard replied, still persistently patient.

Garrus put the soldering gun down.

“Sure you don’t want anyone closer to home, Shepard? I know you can always get someone,” he said.

“I don’t want anyone closer to home. I want you,” she said, removing the pistol from the holster and setting it on the workbench.

The way she had said it sounded like a single, long, flowing word that allowed no oxygen anywhere in it. _Idon’twantanyoneclosertohomeIwantyou._ No room in that line for anything stupid like second thoughts.

Garrus couldn’t suppress the smile that crossed his face any more than he could’ve tamped down on the low vibrations that escaped from his whole body. Not for the first time, he was glad he was the only turian on the _Normandy_.

“Ever wondered why smiling in almost all the intelligent species involve the showing off of teeth?” Shepard asked. “It should be unnerving, especially with teeth like yours. They look wicked.”

“They’re all the way at the back and covered by our mandibles,” he said, coughing a little. “We only use them to tear apart food, so showing them off is supposed to be disarming.”

“Showing off talons,” he added, holding up his gloved hands. “That’s another thing altogether.”

Shepard looked at his hands and shivered. Garrus thought it was reflex, prey reacting to a predator. Embarrassed and feeling a little guilty, he put his hands down and went back to soldering.

In the end, Garrus came to her in the dark hours of the _Normandy_ ’s careening approach to the Omega 4 Relay. There was a tense silence that made the narrow corridors feel thick and claustrophobic. After briefing the crew, Shepard had a short meeting with Joker in the cockpit, asking EDI to give her the final rundown on their shields and weapons. When she emerged, the CIC was quiet, except for the grim efficiency of the command crew; they raised their eyes to her as she walked by, exchanging wordless nods. She had reminded the assembled company that her door was open to them, as always. But something about that mission made the crew decide, in unspoken silent agreement, that for once their commander should have some time alone.

This was the space that Garrus took. He locked her cabin door behind him, redundantly tiptoeing across the floor and failing in his awkward struggle to carefully pick his words. It was not the sort of thing that he ever had to do when talking to Shepard, but he was nervous. She gave him a confident kiss, picking up his slack because it was what they'd always done for each other.

When he calmed down, Garrus felt her relax, and he put away the bottle of cheap wine that he brought and she couldn’t drink. Although she was wearing her shit-eating grin, she shook a little when he carried her to bed. It wasn’t until Garrus entered her that he felt their minds clear at last. Neither of them could move. He saw his surprise softly mirrored on her face. _This is working! And it’s really happening._ When their gasping breaths came under some semblance of control, he retreated from her slowly. Her fingers clenched, then, digging into his arms. He noticed with some wonder that beads of liquid had formed in the corners of her eyes. As he pushed urgently into her again, he watched them roll away on her terrifyingly soft skin before disappearing into her hair.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -No, searching for images of "naked turian hunks" is not a good idea.
> 
> -These two do not strike me as the kind of couple prone to misunderstandings so it comes out as thinking a lot. I think they talk about everything, too, because best friends do.
> 
> -I haven't done this whole writing thing in a while so, thanks for your patience.


	4. Mixtape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Shepard was in the brig but that didn't mean she shouldn't have music._

When Shepard found him on Omega….No. _Before_ that.

_After_ Shepard died and the _Normandy_ crew scattered...No, still not right. _Damn it_.

After he left the _Normandy_ and _then_ Shepard died.

“After, therefore because of it,” the turian muttered to himself. He knew it was fallacious. But that only mattered if he was interested in logic and he wasn’t. Because what it felt like was _after_ he left the _Normandy_ and _then_ Shepard died. That was when Garrus Vakarian wrecked himself on the face of Omega. It was a full-on death collision. He slammed, scraped, gouged and eviscerated it with everything he had, and then some. He had expected the whole enterprise to take him down, but for reasons that did not always have anything to do with skill or careful planning, it never managed to end him.

It only made sense—in that illogical, irrational way—for Shepard herself to come waltzing in from the dead just when he had only one magazine left to spare. By then, he had been deep in cosmic debt at least twice, and in short order, paid twice over with the lives of his own men. He had never felt anguish blend with delirium as sharply as they did as when she cradled his dead weight in her arms. He gurgled his goodbyes while his lungs filled with blood. With Shepard whispering urgently in his ears, his vision went dark.

Garrus had not been back on Omega by himself since that day. He went back a number of times but always with the _Normandy_ crew as a _Normandy_ crew with a _Normandy_ mission. Because at the bottom of all that drama, he did die on that rock. He had intended to pull out all its teeth until it swallowed him whole and ground him up into unrecognizable pieces before spitting him out. He had to figure out how to reassemble the pieces. Recalibrating himself after that had only been possible because of Shepard.

When he finally returned to Omega alone, Garrus told himself coming back was only incidental to what he wanted done. But who was he kidding. He _wanted_ to return; he wanted to close the books on Archangel the way finding Sidonis hadn’t. He didn't want elaborate rituals; no prayers or offerings. He wanted the simple act of stepping back on this rock with no burden other than his own so he could unload it. He would have preferred to do this with Shepard but somebody else had her; what else could he do.

As soon as he docked, though, Garrus was immediately consumed by the task at hand. Only later did he realize that he had, in fact, done it. Omega was just another place to him again. He still felt the tug of dulled memories, but gone was the stab of searing pain. There were more important things than his private grief.

Garrus had gone through a lot of trouble so he would not have to involve any of the Alliance crew on the _Normandy_. He had tried everything, but Alliance lock-down prison turned out to be an actual lock-down. He was good, but when he noticed he was no longer just trying to evade a small team of network security techs, he had to stop. He would have needed Legion to pull anything off against an entire security division if it came to that. His remaining options would have involved treason (which he could still do) but then he would have had to wait until he got back to Palaven. He did not want to wait.

Out of options and pressed for time, Garrus decided in the end to reach out to Anderson, preferring the brazen approach to back-channel communication (it would have gotten other people in trouble). The conversation had been painfully oblique even though it didn’t have to be. Neither of them wanted to talk about the on-going trial since it would involve talking about Shepard's legendary temper and her vast reserves of subtle insults. They were also both fully aware their vidcall was being monitored by both the Alliance and the Hierarchy. No matter what he said, all the snoops would have heard the same thing: “Hey, I want to send a message to ol’ Shep but your firewalls keep going up every time I hack them. A little help here?”. What he actually said was, “How’s Commander Shepard?”.

“She’s flabby and bored,” Anderson told him. Only Shepard could be bored while being tried for war crimes.

The anecdotes that followed were irritating at first, until Garrus realized what the old captain was telling him. After the first two weeks, he said Shepard had started badgering Command to allow her to have books to read. She was not allowed access to anything electronic so it had to be actual paper books. She wrote every day for the next three weeks, getting artful in her use of language in a way that made the brig commander cringe and the filing clerk to guffaw.

Finally, Anderson went on with a chortle, Shepard wrote a two-page position paper backwards from her signature on top, then the last word of the last paragraph and on to the opening salutations, ending with the date and addressee—also written backwards.

Driven half-mad, the barracks commander got clearance to let Shepard have books and a tape deck for music.

Now, _that_ was something Garrus could work with. Books were out of the question, he didn’t have that kind of resources. It would have to be “tape deck”, whatever that was. He thanked Anderson and went on to do some research. It turned out he still had to track down one specific Alliance vessel after all.

It was this information that forced Garrus on the path that ultimately brought him back to Omega; to one room in particular. It was a necessary grease-stop to make the rest of his plan go smoothly; he wanted to avoid any and all snag. So he lurked in that darkness, behind the cliché that were the drapes, singing pop songs in his head while he waited. He was thankful that turians did not itch. Or sneeze. If he was lucky, he could stay that way for possibly a few more agonizing hours. If he was luckier, he would not have to draw any of his weapons. At least the sounds of wet lust coming from the bed at the far end of the room were finally slowing down.

Garrus had not counted on this specific scenario; he thought Aria T’loak would be more careful. Bringing sex to her private quarters did not strike him as particularly prudent, security-wise; especially since there were other rooms in the club. A well-trained operative could take one look at the surroundings and easily come up with a plan of attack; anticipating any, if not all, of the possible traps whose design could be concocted only by a mind like Aria’s.

Garrus did not move a muscle even when the asari let out a low, extended moan. From his hiding place, he could both see and feel the glow and crackle of biotic blue, followed by an eruption of pheromones that did make him want to gag. He realized immediately that even considering his recent, um, drought; it didn’t do anything for him. He couldn’t be sure if it was his military training (possible), his general disinterest in alien females (probable) or some other reason (Shepard) that only brought him longing and desolation if he thought about it (her) too much.

After long minutes of heavy breathing faintly echoing against the high ceilings, there was an urgent shuffling of cloth and metal, followed by an irritated grunt and a sharp retort from the asari. Then, the sound of boots being slipped on, boots thumping on the floor and finally, the anti-climactic swoosh of hydraulics as the door opened and closed. He continued to wait silently, straining to hear her breathing; it was there, calm and even. A few more minutes later, there was the sound of Aria getting out of bed, followed by a clink of glass against glass.

“Drink, Vakarian?”

He chuckled. _Figures._

Garrus stepped out from behind the drapes, feeling a little cheesy. He approached slowly but deliberately. He wasn’t worried about being shot or folded into more dimensions than should be physically possible. But he wanted to avoid irritating Aria T’loak in her own bedroom. She handed him a glass of what smelled like expensive brandy, eyes following his every movement as he stepped back, keeping both hands visible and maintaining a polite distance. Considering she was completely naked.

“How many of your people spotted me?” he asked.

A chortle from Aria. “You idiot,” she said, rolling her eyes. She padded across the floor and made a dramatic show of settling down on the settee with her legs crossed. “I saw you slither out of the laundry chute before I left hours ago. Next time use the vent above the hot tub; it’s not visible from my dresser.”

“Too small, I’d have had to take off my armor.”

The asari did not smile but he thought she looked interested. _Yeah, I know about that vent. And the one behind the bed._

“So,” she said, waving a hand at him. “You’re already drinking my alcohol; what else can I do for you, Adviser Vakarian?”

Garrus did not take his eyes off Aria. Spirits, she was as bad as Liara. He only just received his appointment; he hadn’t even told Solana yet. He was going to do that when he returned to Palaven in a few days. He wondered how much Aria could see that Liara couldn’t. Or vice versa. He was sure though that the two had crossed paths even if they might not have known it. More likely, there were areas where Aria’s access to information had higher resolution just from being in closer proximity. Whereas Liara would have to zoom in and focus. But his friend, unlike the predator in front of him, had the big picture.

“I have personal business on Omega,” he said, making his decision. His best option to get Aria’s cooperation was to just stick close to the truth. “It will be easier for me that you know I’m here instead of having you get in my way. I can’t afford any kind of noise.”

Aria’s eyes appeared to flash for a sliver of a second; her usual half-sneer, half-smile flickering on the corners of her lips. He could tell she was toying with at least half a dozen ideas for how she could make his life miserable for no other reason than it would amuse her. That lasted only for a few more seconds, though. Then she just looked bored.

“Fine,” she said with an exaggerated sigh. “I won’t mess with your cozy little tête-à-tête.” She fixed him with a thoughtful glare, tapping a long, slender finger on the arm of the chair. Then, her face still studiously expressionless, she pulled up her omnitool, keyed in some information, and pinged him.

“I just gave you an address,” Aria said, standing up and making no attempt to cover herself. “Her brother-in-law’s widow lives there. That’s where she stays when she’s on Omega. I like that widow, so don’t do anything stupid.”

Garrus did not bother to hide his surprise. He was wary but his doubt did not rise to the level of suspicion. He also knew he could not waste a windfall like this, even if it came from Aria; it solved half his problem. Besides, Aria T’loak had been strange before, letting most of Archangel’s previous interference slide without retaliation. She seemed content to wait for him to do her small favors in return.

Aria also wasn’t stupid. She had to know there was nothing she could spring on him that he could not or would not slingshot back at her. After all, she knew enough of Archangel’s work to also know that locking fringes would get both of them seriously skinned and stretched taut on a tanning rack. It was a comfortable stalemate. So he nodded at her once.

With a slight bow, Garrus took his leave without a word and walked towards the leftmost window of Aria’s solar; the one she often used herself. He almost laughed when he saw the look of surprise on her face as it became obvious to her that he knew exactly how it opened. She didn’t say anything; she just gaped at him with an expression of outrage. He tapped the tempered glass and slipped noiselessly through, ignoring the way the asari’s eyes flew even wider. Yeah, he knew about the wire grid and the tap-touch latch, too. Pushing it open would have sent him forcefully slamming onto the pavement below.

_Whatever_ , he thought; he wasn’t planning on ever needing to get into this room again. She could have her little crisis over the individual ways he had breached her security. He was probably doing her a favor; he was impressed by some of her tricks but none of them posed serious challenge. He wasn’t even half as good as Thane or Kasumi.

“Vakarian,” she called out as Garrus was about to let go of the window frame. He paused, both out of politeness and to brace himself for the jump. “How did my people miss that you’re even on Omega?” she asked. When he just gave her a steady gaze, she actually pouted at him like a petulant child. “Oh, come on! I gave you an address!”

He couldn’t help it, his mandibles spread out a bit. Why the hell not; he was proud of that one and it was a single-use kind of thing anyway. So he told her.

"A hood and a dress.”

Aria did not allow a slight smile until he’d slipped into the back alley, ducking behind a dumpster.

Garrus was pleased with the address Aria had given him. He was very familiar with that section of the Tuhi District. It was a much better option than marching up the landing dock with talons flashing and mandibles flaring. His odds would have been worse than when the _Normandy_ jumped into the Omega 4 relay. No, the widow’s house was better. It would allow him to be discreet up to the very last second, sneaking around buildings and startling civilians out of their breeches in order to have the quiet conversation he was after.

Now, if only he could ditch whoever was tailing him.

Garrus had been trying to keep his head low but the ill-fitting armor was a little high at the front and blocked his view. The stairwell stank of vigorous fermentation that was making him cross-eyed. He needed to get back out into fresh air. He spotted the ledge above another dumpster; he could run over to that, get on the ledge from it and grab the railings that supported the billboard above Oreg’s shuttle rental. The old volus was not there--he'd already checked the day before. He marked it because the shop was closed and he was unlikely to run into anyone, if he ever needed to break in.

Running to the dumpster would force him out in the open (where there was breathable air!) but maybe that was not such a bad idea. In the next split-second, his body just went for it. That stench was so powerful he imagined it coalescing into a solid shape and catapulting him across the empty street.

As he tucked himself back in the shadows, however, Garrus caught another glimpse of shimmering black. _Damn it. Who was that?_ He was not particularly pleased by the prospect of having to maim somebody when he was trying to be discreet. It was only the accident of turning his head at the right time that he even noticed the shadowy flicker the first time. The silhouette was wearing an otherwise dull armor that would have been invisible if a passing vorcha had not been drawing a deep puff of his cigarette. That had been pure luck; it was making him edgy. Unless he was being deliberately shown he was being followed? He needed to get to that roof and drop into the small courtyard. After that, there were at least six exits he could pick from that would take him to the closest mine tunnel and to the address Aria had given him. But first, whoever was following him had to take a long nap inside one of the crates he knew was on that roof. He had to be visible just long enough to draw whoever it was. Two could play this game.

With a final scanning glance at the shadows across the street, Garrus calmly stood up. _Yeah, take a good look, whoever you are._ He then grabbed the side of the dumpster and lifted his entire weight with the strength of his arms alone. Once on top, he went for the ledge the same way. Without breaking his momentum, he reached for one of the support railings and swung his body to the opposite side, catching the opposite post with both legs. It was a long reach but then, that was one thing he definitely had, despite lacking flexibility. He couldn’t help the escaping chortle. It nearly made him miss his grip on the horizontal bar that prevented his head from slamming against the billboard.

“Great,” he thought. “My plates don’t budge standing in a room with people having sex but words like _reach_ and _flexibility_ nearly get me killed.” Or at least badly broken. He was less than four levels above the ground, the fall would be annoyingly survivable. And that would be worse because it was embarrassing and he would be alive to suffer it.

Garrus was now behind the billboard, dangling like a varren on a spit rod without a plan. “Laugh it up, Shepard,” he thought. “I had a plan.” Yeah, that wasn’t going to work, though. What he couldn’t see from below were the broken brackets on the metal strut he needed to reach. Fuck. Maybe he could shimmy to the side, stand on th--

His pistol was out before he even took the next breath. His finger was already pressing the trigger when he recognized the pair of eyes that just blinked at him from above.

“So what was your plan?” said the familiar voice that sounded like tank treads lubricated with coarse sand.

“Thane?”

The drell was perched impossibly on something Garrus could not make out because it was just small enough to be hidden under Krios’ feet. _How was he doing that?_ Then the assassin held out a hand. _You’ve got to be kidding_ , he thought.

Garrus did some quick physics in his head and decided that assuming he wasn’t actually floating in midair, Krios could probably handle his weight; with enough momentum he might even make it. Then, all he needed to worry about was crushing the drell to death before plummeting to the ground. He reached for the hand and was suddenly weightless for a split-second; swinging to the side before being literally thrown over the parapet on to the roof. His landing was soft but instinct made him roll anyway. Shit. He forgot the drell was a biotic. He knew that, but the assassin’s skills were such that he hardly ever had the need to use it.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, picking himself up, feeling like he’d been caught plundering Solana’s stash of kava sweets. This was awkward. He wiped his hands against the side of his armor and when he looked up, the feeling only intensified.

Krios regarded him in silence; looking elegantly lethal as ever, with his hands clasped together behind him, and his face inscrutably placid.

“I thought you were supposed to be at the Citadel,” Garrus said, knowing he sounded like a child.

“You were supposed to be on Palaven,” Krios returned.

“I’m here for a thing.” That sounded worse.

The drell did not say anything. He just turned and walked over to a nearby crate. When he looked back at him, he was holding out a canister towards him. “It is turian tea,” he said.

Garrus stared at the canister. “You had time to make me turian tea?” he managed to say. “How bad was I?”

Krios let out a rumble that sounded like laughter. “Not at all, I lost you at least twice,” he said. “Painting over your markings was a good idea. Next time practice some alterations to your gait.”

“Walk funny. Right.” Garrus unscrewed the top of the canister and took generous gulps. It was getting cold and hot liquid was exactly what he needed.

“Oh, that was good,” he said. “Thank you, Sere.”

“You are welcome,” said Krios, sipping from another canister.

It was turning into a regular roof party. He noticed for the first time that the drell seemed...slight. He sounded composed and moved like liquid poison. But his color looked off; where his skin was visible through his light armor, the scales looked slightly dull.

“How are you, Thane?” he asked, trying not to sound too worried. This was Thane Krios, however. He would drop everything if he needed help. But the drell shook his head once.

“You need not worry,” Krios said. “All is well in hand. I just have business here that needed to be conducted in person; then, I return to the Citadel.”

Garrus nodded. That would have to do, the drell was entitled to his privacy. He walked over to the edge of the roof and put a foot on the parapet. There was breeze even on Omega. Unlike most space stations, though, there was a sharp wafting odor of ozone coming from the eezo mines deep in the bowels of the asteroid. It hinted at the slowly failing filtration system. For all her melodramatic squawking about being queen of Omega, Aria seemed to only care about the idea of Omega. The carcass itself was largely in its own.

The jagged silhouette of the residential districts rose in rough contrast against the garish pulsing lights of Afterlife. The disparity made the club look like a festering boil in the throes of luminescent infection. Drell and turian stood side by side staring at it from the roof, basking in malodorous but companionable silence.

Garrus had not planned to be so leisurely but he accepted the pause if only to clear his thoughts before finding his way into the mine tunnels. Archangel had used the mine for his own purposes, and in the process, rediscovered older networks that were referenced but no longer mapped in the database. At some point, he had gone with his team and closed off entire sections for themselves, hiding the sealed entrances while opening new ones to redirect traffic away. Then, he had Mierin wipe them out from every database they could break into. This was Archangel’s priceless asset and he was the last person alive to own it. Archangel planned long term and for keeps. Garrus considered it his inheritance. _Thanks, asshole._

Krios was so preternaturally relaxed, Garrus felt some of his own anxiety melt away. The two of them had often drank together on the Normandy this way: sharing the silence while they disappeared into their own head space. But Krios had never even offered, let alone made him tea of any kind. So what was up with the tea, he wondered? The canister was halfway to his mouth when the thought occurred to him.

“You know why I’m here?” he asked, turning to face the drell. Aria had figured out why he was on Omega; Krios would, too.

“I suspected,” said Krios. “The _Orizaba_ docked this morning. So if you are meeting her tonight, you do not want to smell of alcohol.”

_Ugh_. He had been so concerned about clearing his path, Garrus had not even thought of how he would _smell._ He wasn’t even done worrying about how to avoid getting shot at by Captain Hannah Shepard just for showing up without an appointment or something. But there was something in the way the drell was looking at him that made him nervous again. Something else was going on.

“What?” he asked Krios with a tinge of unease.

“Congratulations. I am happy for you both.”

“Uh...thanks?”

Krios smiled but he also looked slightly nonplussed. He pointed to the side of his neck, the wrong side. His scar was on the right side of his face.

“You are a lucky man,” the drell said.

Garrus ran a finger on his own neck, trying to feel for whatever it was Krios was talking about. He couldn’t feel anything at first, just the usual speckles that tracked a path on his skin from the top of his chest to the underside of his fringes. Except one spot felt a little... _Oh._

“You...ah...wouldn’t happen to have a mirror on you, would you?” He felt suddenly faint. He wanted to laugh and let loose from all of his syrinxes. Was it even possible? Spirits, he was fucked! She wasn’t even turian! A plaintive voice at the back of his mind told him he should be somewhat alarmed by this technicality but euphoria was already building up in his chest.

Out of pure instinct, Garrus tilted his head back and started to draw a long breath. From deep in his chest, there was a tight rumbling several octaves apart rolling over and under each other; racing for release.

But Krios was fast. In the next instant, a hand was on his mouth, pressing both his mandibles hard into the sides of his face, his thrumming cut abruptly by his gasping breath.

“That would not be wise, Garrus,” Krios said quietly into his ear. “This is Omega. You’ll be calling every malfeasant to your location.”

The turian was large but the drell was surprisingly strong; the fist of his other hand was pressing forcefully against Garrus’ back, forcing his body to arch backwards in a way that leveraged every breakable joint along the entire length of his spine. For the second time that night, he worried about breaking the drell by trying to snap out of his grip. Less smugly, he was not entirely sure he understood what the assassin could do with that fist against his back. Add to that, the button on those cuffs were probably not just buttons and could probably tranquilize him with the flick of a wrist. So, he held his position, trying to control his breathing until he was sure he was calm enough to be let go. Krios held fast and he was thankful. It wasn’t the assortment of assholes he was worried about; to them he’d just be howling. What mortified him were the _turians_ on Omega who would recognize and possibly _respond_ to the unexpected discharge of turian lamentations to a faraway mate.

When he felt calm enough, Garrus slowly raised his open hands. He discovered he could hold up his arms only _just so_ before he felt the sharp, electric pain on his back. _Ah, there it is._ He kept his hands up anyway, as high as he could hold them.

“Are you certain, Garrus?”

He nodded vigorously.

Slowly, Krios released his grip. Garrus tried to untangle his joints, mumbling his thanks for the second time that night. His face felt like a drell just grabbed it and the pressure somehow liquefied his legs.

“You did not know you have imprinted?” Krios asked, handing him back his tea. Garrus shook his head and drank the rest of the liquid, adrenalin still pumping through his bloodstream. He tried leaning against one the crates but it wasn’t enough. His own weight was pressing him down, so he gave in and slumped on the concrete roof.

“I know how I feel; I’ve known for a while. But this...this is unexpected,” he croaked, his voice hoarse from the effort of containing his thrumming down to a monotonous hum. “How far up is it?”

Krios reached down and touched a finger on a point that felt a little high on his neck. His scaled spots, normally visible only because of the surrounding halo of dark color, had started to bump out more and turn glossy black while the surrounding skin turned gray. The color was in stark relief, especially against his colony markings. His own neck and he didn’t even notice. He should really feel alarmed ( _she’s not even turian!_ ). He was too ecstatic for alarms.

“Does Shepard know?” Krios asked in a careful, quiet voice.

“It’s a longer conversation than we had time for,” Garrus answered, sounding as dispirited as he suddenly felt. “Hackett was already on the _Normandy_ when she returned from the Bahak system. I didn’t…I don’t want to presume.” He wondered how long it would take before the _Krutr r’ach_ covered the entire length of his neck and the back of his head. He would have to conceal it while he was on Palaven, at least until he talked to Shepard. _That could be forever._

Garrus froze, staring at Krios. “I can’t go. I can’t talk to Captain Shepard. Not like this, not until I talk to Shepard.”

“You can and you will,” the drell said firmly.

“Thane, you have to do it, I’ll give you the address.” Garrus jumped to his feet, fumbled with the side of his armor and held up a small rectangular object less than half the size of a datapad. “It’s all just music. I had to copy it to this format.”

Krios took the object and turned it over in his hand. He did not look like he recognized it or knew how it worked.

“It’s an analog magnetic tape,” Garrus explained. “It’s all she’s allowed to have while on lock-down. I couldn’t get her extranet access.”

The drell put the cartridge back in his hand, took a step towards him and reached for the neck of his under-armor. He pulled it upwards, hard. Then Krios was holding a black cloth that came out of nowhere and was tying it around his neck.

“It’s unlikely that Captain Shepard will even know what these marks mean, or that they have anything to do with her daughter,” he said in a low voice. “This cloth is mostly to keep you focused. The time to have the conversation with Shepard will have to wait. Right now, your hope is what she needs.”

Krios was tucking the bottom edge of the scarf into the top of his under-armor. When he was satisfied, he patted Garrus on the shoulders. “That should be adequate,” he said.

“I look like an asshole.”

“The important thing is that no one will know why.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Krios is da man.
> 
> Capt. Hannah Shepard--captain of the _SSV Orizaba_ , Shepard's mother if you play her as a spacer
> 
> Also, I feel I have to add this, because--well, kids today!
> 
> Cassette tape--Introduced on Earth in 1963 CE. It uses ferrous oxide powder with a binding agent on a plastic tape. It records sound using electric current to generate magnetic field that realigns the ferrous oxide. On playback, the sound is reproduced by the variations in the ferrous oxide positions and amped through the
> 
> Mixtape--a compilation of favorite pieces of music, typically by different artists, recorded onto a cassette tape or other medium by an individual. It used to be a thing.
> 
> Tape deck--the equipment that can read and write on cassettes.


	5. Random Cerberus Trooper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He was twelve when his owners finally gave him a name, only because the forms required it. He thought he was set for greatness. Or at least, more food. Not so much, it turned out. He was sold again, and then he was fodder._

This random Cerberus assault trooper was only remarkable because, for several hours that day, his head was stuck between the floor and the railing of a low wall. Although he was only conscious for a few minutes of it at a time, those were minutes of abject terror. He had little sense of how it happened, only that he was caught in a biotic warp ball that wasn’t even strong enough to lift him off his feet. But it had exploded with such ferocious power that he found himself skidding on the tile. The tempered glass held together when his body hit it, but his angle was wrong. His head became wedged thusly, on the second level overlooking the spacious and opulent atrium of Grissom Academy. He could not pull himself out.

Several light years away at around the same time, Garrus Vakarian was standing outside the captain’s cabin on board the _SSV Normandy_ , thinking how startled humans always made him laugh. Their whole body would spasm for a split -second while their brains made rapid fight-or-flight decisions, shoulders stiff, fingers splayed and their eyes wide. They were such preys, it was hilarious. He’d never seen Shepard startle, but that was what she just did and it surprised him so badly, _he_ startled.

“Garrus!” She was in full armor.

“Shepard,” he replied.

“No time, gear up, we got a rescue call.”

Garrus was always suited up, except when he was...well, carrying a bottle of wine to her cabin in the middle of the night. She rushed past him to the elevator and held the door open for him, looking impatient.

“Where are we going?” he asked as the elevator descended to the CIC.

“Petra. We’re evacuating human biotics., Their school is under attack by Cerberus right now,” she said, sending out calls on her omni-tool. When she noticed Garrus was out of armor with a bottle of wine, she winced. “Oops,” she said in a small voice, stepping out of the elevator. He waved her off, already shifting priorities.

“Five minutes!” Garrus called out as the elevator door closed. _That worked well,_ he thought wryly.

It took less than four minutes for Garrus to put on his armor and appear in the shuttle bay, his rifle already on his back. Vega looked ready but was yawning back-to-back. It was 2300 hours, and he was probably already asleep when his alert went off.

“Are there going to be krogan? Why am I here?” he asked as Garrus picked up his ammo from the locker.

“It’s Cerberus,” Garrus replied.

“You talked to her yet, Scars?”

The suddenness of the question dislodged him for a split -second. He caught it quickly, though. He was getting good at it. “No time,” he said, echoing Shepard’s quick dismissal just as Cortez fired up the shuttle engine. The elevator door opened just then and Shepard emerged, followed by Traynor, who was talking rapidly.

“We’re only getting sporadic messages from someone in the academy, so all we know is that Cerberus is trying to round up the kids,” Shepard hollered above the engine noise. “We’re going to have to get closer to get a stable comm link.”

“The Kodiak is all set, Commander;, you can try reaching them on your way,” Traynor said, as they boarded.

“Joker, we don’t know how many people there are, so I want the _Normandy_ to hang back just close enough to round people up,” Shepard said, nodding when Joker acknowledged. “Extra kits, Vega?”

“Yes, sir!” Vega hollered back. “I’ll keep an eye out for first aid boxes, too. Hope we won’t need that many.”

“Take us out, Cortez.”

When the Kodiak made a stealth landing on the space station, that same random Cerberus trooper was still wedged tightly in place. For what seemed like forever, he could hear screams echoing through the high ceilings of the atrium, followed by loud banging elsewhere, a series of explosions, and more screams. Where he was, he could only see flashes and hear the _thwoomph_ of heavy fire. Wave after wave of Cerberus troopers and guardians were rappelling from the roof and as they disappeared into every corridor leading out of the atrium, the screams and explosions would intensify again.

Throughout the cacophony of intense fighting, this accident of a Cerberus assault trooper noticed with mild irritation that his knee hurt. Not his head, with the metal railing pressing tightly against the side of his three-ply titanium/carbon composite helmet; not his shoulder which he was sure was broken; and not even the two fingers in his left hand bleeding inside his gloves. It was his right knee, throbbing from the rheumatoid arthritis that he had had since he was a child.

The pain in his knee just added insult to his predicament. He knew he had to wiggle himself out and hide somewhere, but the entire building seemed determined to hold him down. Every millimeter he thought he gained only wedged him tighter until he couldn’t even wiggle anymore. Good thing the atrium was a staging area instead of an actual battleground. He’d have time to try, and free himself, he thought. That is, until a turret started firing relentlessly underneath him. He couldn’t see where, but he could feel the floor trembling with the force of it.

The first person that came into the trooper’s view was not other Cerberus fighters, however, but a hulking soldier in thick bulky armor moving impossibly fast across the atrium.

“Shut the shit down, Vega!” someone yelled. It was a woman. She was directly behind the bulky guy apparently named Vega, throwing a volley of grenades and overload charges at the Atlas that just emerged from a hallway.

James Vega was large, but only those who had never seen him in battle would be surprised by his agility. This random Cerberus trooper, of course, had never seen Vega fight. He watched as the heavy armor flitted in and out of his line of sight like it weighed nothing, always firing in long committed bursts. The woman behind him alternated between pistol shots and volleys of overload charges, hands waving gracefully in swift, exacting motions.

From his position, the trooper watched in disbelief as Vega made a barreling approach to the Atlas, relying on his speed and footwork to avoid heavy fire with his barrier pulsing aggressively to block the hits. Suddenly, the soldier was on his back, sliding the rest of the way as he fired rapidly at the Atlas’ weapons. As if on cue, the woman tossed a couple of grenades, enough to short the Atlas’ shields. The damage momentarily stunned the pilot who had no time even for surprise. A second spray from Vega cracked the glass in the cockpit, and that was all it took. In the next instant, the pilot’s head exploded from a single shot that came from somewhere else.

Vega was still sliding but was quickly on his feet, and diving forward to duck behind a concrete wall as the Atlas blew up. The woman had already rolled behind a row of benches, one hand shooting at a couple of advancing guardians and the other hand waving in a rhythmic deployment of more grenades.

There was no time for pause; a rope dangling from the skylight sparked with rapid bursts of overload charge and the trooper watched as three more assault troopers plummeted to the first floor. Within seconds, they were dead from single shots to the head—their visor clouding with generous splatters of blood.

The two soldiers were already rushing towards a corridor, and out of his sight. The trooper realized there was a third person somewhere in the atrium; a sniper picking out targets and changing positions to avoid being pinned down. _Smart._ He tried to wiggle his head to see where the sniper was, but he couldn’t. All he could see were other Cerberus troopers and even shielded guardians collapsing like rag dolls from single shots coming from somewhere below. The hits were systematic, first singling out the guardians rappelling from the roof and then the troopers shuffling too close to the advancing duo on the ground. The shots came in quick succession. Whoever it was, they weren’t even pausing to line up their shots. _Who are these people?_

Without warning, a piercing screech ripped through the trooper’s comm link, making his head jerk uselessly against the metal railing. A centurion had emerged from a hallway, flanked by several assault troopers and two guardians. There was a loud yelp, but he couldn’t see where until the flash of red armor crossed his line of sight, crackling with biotic energy.

“Watch your three, Shepard!” Vega yelled over his shoulder.

At that, the woman rolled back to her feet as soon as she hit the ground and was already shooting with both hands. Two Cerberus squads were making a slow charge from both sides of the atrium, flanking the two soldiers.

If the fight had looked like organized chaos for the first few minutes, it was at that moment that it then gave way to pandemonium.

Flashes of biotic attacks ignited the very air inside the building as three more centurions emerged, accompanied by more Cerberus troops. The trooper caught glimpses of running legs on the upper levels, wrapped in the gentle, wavering shimmer of blue. Flash after flash of blinding light tangled with the shriek of bullets seeking contact with flesh.

When she came into the trooper's view again, the woman was zigzagging through the Atrium, firing bullets and overloads as if she knew where every Cerberus agent was and where they were running to. He watched mesmerized as her hands darted in different directions. Vega followed with shot after shot to finish off the targets momentarily stunned by her attacks. Then they would switch—Vega would start with a wave of devastating shots and the woman fired the kill shots. They were double-tapping every enemy and even if that failed, a third kill-shot never did. If the sniper hit failed, the double-tap that followed always finished.

It was dance, graceful and flawlessly efficient.

Just then, both soldiers were peppered with a volley of shots, forcing them to duck behind a row of benches. The trooper heard muffled voices—not through his comm but from somewhere else—giving orders that he couldn’t make out. After that, he caught a glimpse of warp balls zipping across the atrium and the sound of falling metal followed. There was a dull thud of bullets finding their target somewhere above him, followed by a centurion falling with a muffled scream. Those shots, he realized to his horror, had come from right across where he was stuck, literally immobilized by architecture. The sniper had moved again and the trooper knew that if he flinched even just a little, he would be spotted and shot. If he kept still, he might be ignored. He closed his eyes tightly, but inside his helmet, he had started to cry.

The trooper only opened his eyes when, in a lull that lasted all of two seconds, he recognized the faint pulsing beep from some kind of grenade. It was coming from somewhere underneath him. An impossibly large turian in black and blue armor came into his view, walking away from a disabled Atlas under the second level flooring. He couldn’t see it, but the 20-foot war mech had been immobilized by an assault rifle wedged between its leg and crotch. The pilot was struggling for control, making the machine whir helplessly.

The trooper looked back at the turian—he wasn’t even just walking; he was _swaggering_ away, like it was just any day in some park, and he was contemplating poetry. Then he started throwing rapid hand signals to no one the trooper could see. Without breaking his stride, the turian calmly ducked behind a pillar, swinging his rifle to his face, in search of targets. The beeping turned into a steady, high-pitched whine.

The shock-wave came first, the power of its impact bending the metal that immobilized the trooper. The heat came next, finally tripping his remaining shield. Then came the concussive impact of the explosion, throwing him against the opposite wall and knocking the air out of his lungs.

There was a sudden eerie silence, broken only by the howl of fire and the crackle of biotic energy. In the haze of semi-consciousness, the trooper thought he could hear the agitated chatter of _children_ on the level above him. Another bit of useless information that he didn’t need, right alongside the pulsing pain in his knee and the fact that these were the final minutes of his life. The woman in red armor was already running up the ramp, and he was certain he was most definitely about to die. The turian followed Red Armor facing the opposite direction and still shooting at Cerberus agents throwing down ropes from the roof. Vega, the bulky one, was bringing up the rear and scanning for stragglers.

The trooper felt his eyes watering inside his helmet. None of this was supposed to happen; he didn't know this was what he was signed up for. Could he have been in the wrong line at the reception office? Had he reported to the wrong window? Mistaken the left door for the _other_ left door? Next thing he knew, he was in armor, running up the ramp into a carrier just trying not to get trampled. He came down in the Cerberus vessel the same way along with other Cerberus troopers that he wasn’t entirely sure were people. He wasn’t even receiving orders, only random screeching in the comm link that made his ears ring. None of that mattered now; he was about to die. The soldiers were less than twenty meters away, clearing their path towards where he was. Fifteen. Ten...

The trooper was only half-conscious when he felt himself being lifted off his feet, armor and all. Before he could find out what was happening, he was in the air and slamming on the floor. The pain was excruciating, dulled only by the terror of being sprayed with bullets as he slumped motionless against a bench. His fading consciousness lasted only long enough to register one piercing pain in his side. By the time the last medi-gel shot coursed automatically through his body, he had already—mercifully—blacked out.

He couldn’t tell how long he was out.

But a loud, angry scream jolted the trooper back into consciousness, and he wished he was dead. His ears were ringing. In the unsparing wave of pain that swept over him, his brain just failed to prioritize which to identify first. All of it attacked him, all at once. Gasping desperately for air, he realized his helmet had cracked into halves and when he raised his head, they fell apart. All he could think of was that his head felt indescribably _red_.

Before he could figure it out, a powerful explosion shook the building. Underneath the violence of it, he could hear a second scream, unbridled and furious. Then, he was flying through the air again, choking from the overwhelming stench of ozone and charring flesh. The odor was pungent, sharp and almost sweet; it seared his eyes and throat. He landed on his leg, and he felt it give way to the impact. That he was alive came to him as such a shock, he was more exasperated than afraid. Until he opened his eyes.

A half-naked woman was staring down at him with death in her eyes. She was hairless and perfect. Her whole body was covered with a riot of tattoos, and she was trembling with her own violence. She was, without a doubt, the most exquisitely beautiful thing he had ever seen. In the small space between one second and the next, a look of surprise crossed her face, melting the snarl that seemed permanently etched there. He would have wanted to puzzle through it, except his body was being lifted, yet again, his arms pinned to his sides. His head lolled to the side, and more searing pain shot up from his leg as he swayed forward like a sack of bananas dangling from a crane. To his horror, he saw he was being taken to a Cerberus shuttle. His mind just fell apart when, at the door, he saw the face of a small girl staring wide-eyed at him. She was shaking all over. In the next minute, more faces appeared behind her. They were all _children_.

The soldier in red armor was standing to the side, her face calm. Out of everything that had happened so far, with his leg broken in places he couldn’t even feel, that face was what terrified him the most. When she shouldered her weapon, he stopped breathing.

“Jack.” The trooper jerked his head at the sound of her voice. He felt another wave of helpless terror course through his body as he saw the soldier drop her arm to her side, fingers impatiently tapping the metal of her armor. This kind of calm, in his experience, was usually followed by unrestrained violence.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he heard her say, but the sound suddenly seemed to ebb and echo from somewhere far away.

“He fell right in front of me. I think his leg is broken,” Jack said from behind him as she sauntered calmly towards the shuttle.

Vega and the turian were already aiming their weapons at him. He couldn’t move his arms. Every face he could see mirrored his confusion; but theirs didn’t have his despair. There were other muffled voices, but they, too, faded from his hearing. The last thing he remembered was feeling unreasonably hopeful. Then his head fell forward and he passed out.

“He’s out,” Garrus said.

“Is he dead?” Vega asked.

Garrus angled his visor towards the unconscious trooper still suspended in midair.

“He’s breathing,” he said. He realized that Jack was restraining the trooper with a thin tendril of biotic energy. He’d never seen biotics used this way before. It was a stunning demonstration of the surgical precision with which the biotic could control her ability. She wasn’t just power, she was mastery.

“Are you using some kind of biotic restraints?” Garrus couldn’t help asking, curious. It sounded comically out of place. They could hear more Cerberus troops still coming down the far corridor.

“You like? Learned it from Samara,” Jack said, grinning the way only Jack could—mirthless and terrifying.

Garrus took a step towards the trooper and exchanged a look with Shepard. She looked passive, but he didn’t miss the rage that flared across her face. This mission just got even worse.

“Joker, watch your fire, we’re flying out on a Cerberus shuttle,” Shepard said into her comm. Turning, she bellowed at the rest. “Into the shuttle, now!” Her barking order had everyone diving into the vehicle. The signal she gave Garrus was almost imperceptible, but the turian nodded and grabbed the trooper by the back of his armor, whispering, “You move, you die,” in case he could hear. Jack released the shackle.

“Why are we taking this _pendejo_?” Vega yelled above the surge of the engine, fighting for balance as the shuttle lifted off the platform.

“Look at him, James.”

So, James looked. The trooper couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this far. Thanks for the kudos and the comments--they ignite inspiration like rocket fuel.
> 
> I have made some edits to Chapter 3 (R&D) in case you want to go back.
> 
> This chapter is a bit of an outlier for me--more of an experiment in kinetics. After this, we're going to leave our turian hunk to sort his dumbass out. There may be a bigger dumbass out there, so, let's go!


	6. Krogan Bread With A Slice of Clue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Garrus would not look at her. That's definitely not nothing, Shepard thought._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly meta.

The ungainly, gloomy silence of the trip back to the Normandy did not break until Jack decided the best way to lift the cheerlessness was to introduce Vega—whom she just met—to literature. She sent him an extranet link to a piece of what she called “contemporary literature”. It was so contemporary, in fact, that the protagonist was actually still alive. And not even entirely fictional.

“Good, right?” Jack said, clearly pleased with the way Vega’s face turned several shades of red inside of fifteen seconds. She was actually giggling; it should have looked adorable, but even laughing she looked angry. It was met with a collective groan as the shuttle door opened, and Garrus jumped out, trotting towards the landing controls.

The look on Vega’s face made Jack howl with glee; the sound was only slightly less horrifying than the kind of pornography she was talking about.

“This is fan fiction?" Vega asked in disbelief. "Who writes them?” 

“Anyone who wants to, muscleman,” Jack replied, motioning to her students to get out. “They’re all over the extranet. You should try reading them yourself.”

“But...but these are real people!” Vega countered.

“Who cares?,” came the retort. “Shepard is famous, she has fans. So does Alenko. And T’soni.”

“And they’re all about sex?” the marine asked, incredulous.

“What the fuck, gutter-brain. Not all of them,” the biotic replied.“A lot of them are about Shepard boinking everyone, though.”

“Lola porn,” Vega muttered, exaggerating his shudder to drive home the point.

“What part of that is shocking to you, Hercules?” Jack was teasing. “The fact that Shepard inspires pornography or the idea that she fucks at all?”

Vega gagged. Actually gagged.

“Hey!” Shepard hit him with the back of her hand, throwing a glance at the huddled students listening eagerly. Why wasn’t anyone paying the filth fine for this conversation?

“Sorry, but that’s just...wrong, Commander.” Vega looked genuinely discombobulated by the notion. “No offense, I swear.”

The students spilled out of the shuttle first. Shepard tried to suppress a smile as she watched Jack appraising each of them as they jumped out into the shuttle bay, noting every scratch, smear and possible injury. As soon as the students were out, Chakwas and four marines rushed into the small space to haul the Cerberus trooper out, and onto the waiting gurney. Vega had to press himself against a wall to keep out of the way.

“Send me the link, Jack, I want to read the stuff, ” Joker chimed in from the comm link. “Don’t worry, Commander, I’d totally do you,” he added reassuringly. “If you weren’t, you know, you.”

“Aw goddammit, Moreau,” Vega groaned like he had just been forced to look at his grandmother’s private parts. Jack snorted loudly, adding “You’re a liar, Moreau. You probably wrote some of that stuff yourself.”

“Alright! That’s enough,” Shepard yelled in her best “I’m Laughing Now But Don’t Push It” voice. As the shuttle’s engine wound down, the unholy blurple light switched on, blinding all of them. Vakarian was already hitting the control panel to clamp the shuttle down on the conveyor. It was a new model; she guessed he probably intended to rip it apart, piece by piece.

 _Odd_. _There it was again_ , Shepard thought. That was the second time Vakarian bounced away and avoided looking at her. Or maybe it was only the second time she _noticed_ ; she couldn’t be sure. But he was like that in the mess hall yesterday, too; jumping up when she walked in like he had fire ants in his cowl ( _what have I done_ _now?_ ) and looking away. For a brief, terrifying moment, she thought he might be terminally ill. She had noticed the discoloration on his neck, even though he tried to hide it with a sudden predilection for dorky scarves, of all things. But that sort of thing would have hit her desk; Dr. Chakwas definitely would have reported it. _Stress? Allergies? Probably stress; he did just lose his planet, and he_ _was_ _still losing people._

Shepard had waited up for him the night they returned from Menae, but he didn’t come up to her cabin with the wine he was bragging about. She had shrugged it off, knowing she had several days of head start on the whole My Planet Is Burning experience. She figured he was probably huddled with Victus, commiserating. And he did show up with a bottle of bad timing right before Petra. That looking away business, though? That was new. And that was definitely not nothing. Unfortunately, there were kids to patch up and get rid of. Everything else would have to go on the list of Other Shit To Clean Up Later.

Shepard stood back as the unconscious Cerberus kid was wheeled out on a gurney. He was inside a polymer cocoon with tubes coming out of his throat. Chakwas said his lung had collapsed inside the armor which they’d have to disassemble in the medbay.

“What’s going to happen to him now?” asked Dr. Sanders as she shepherded the other kids into the decontamination box. Shepard looked up at her, absently tapping her fingers on her armor.

“Hackett will take him,” she said. “After that, I don’t know. If he survives, they’ll want to talk to him.”

“Not if I take him first.” Jack was almost growling.

Shepard eyed the biotic coldly. Surely she wasn’t suggesting what she sounded like she was suggesting. Except it wasn’t an entirely horrible idea.

“At least let them clear him first, Jack,” she said finally. "Make sure he's not packing anything in his brain."

“Yeah? And how do Alliance assholes do that?”

 _She got you there, Alliance asshole,_ Shepard thought.

“We’ll give him to Javik,” she declared in a tone that hinted she wasn’t about to entertain opposition. Everybody within earshot understood it. Well. Almost everybody.

“How would he know if this kid is indoctrinated? Protheans couldn’t tell it of their own people.” That was Garrus, speaking with his back still turned, probably pretending to be still hammering on the conveyor control. Then the Cerberus shuttle started to move. Okay, maybe not pretending.

“The kid’s human,” Shepard said, dismissing both her irritation and Garrus’ objection. “Javik will know.”

With that, Shepard walked towards the glass enclosure, watching Jack’s kids come out mostly clean. They all looked so young; much younger than she thought they were. It was hard to believe they actually had these kids in the fight with Cerberus. While she stood back observing the students, she could still feel the eyes on her back, and the silent question that was left hanging in the air. Exactly what had Javik done to her when he popped out of his pod? She had staggered from the contact, blacking out for less than a minute. But it left her woozy for hours. The prothean, on the other hand, emerged from it glaring at them with scornful eyes, and perfect English—the flash of momentary panic gone so completely that it made them wonder if it was really there at all.

Shepard decided she didn’t know, either. The prothean’s explanation was disquietingly dismissive. Nevertheless, Javik would still know better. Even if he didn’t, and even if the Cerberus kid was somehow infected with reaper shit, the safest place would still be with Jack who didn’t have the bureaucratic crap that an indoctrinated agent could disappear into. If the trooper was a plant, the Illusive Man was most probably counting on him being embedded in the Alliance, not carted away to the unofficial classroom within a barely-official school. Even if that asshole intended for the trooper to be in Jack’s team, Shepard still trusted the biotic to contain him better than the lumbering, absent-minded Alliance bureaucracy ever could. Sleepers were dangerous only if you didn’t know where they slept.

All these assumed that the kid would survive. That was unknown at this point so Shepard shuffled the issue back into her mental pile of pending issues.

In the meantime, she needed to physically wash the Cerberus encounter off from herself. Even Jack had blood on her pant legs that looked slightly purple. Shepard’s own armor was dripping with things she could barely identify now. _I_ _wonder how_ _Jack’s fan fictions talked about this part,_ she thought. The mind-numbing stuff.

The Alliance was constantly spewing carefully coiffed PR vids that made it seem like people just magically materialized in and out of battle gear, always accompanied by misty fog, dramatic lighting, and glorious, uplifting music. Shepard imagined herself fluidly shedding the pieces of her armor (in slow motion, naturally); soft, billowing smoke blowing from the fog machine setting her up for that moment when she would shake her blow-dried, back-lit hair, and bullshit would fall out.

It was laughable. Behind the glamor shots, post-mission clean-up was, in fact, a whole new planet of fucknuttery. Not everyone had biotics so powerful that they could traipse into a battleground wearing a singlet. So most of them had to wear armor—a complex machine that took an extraordinary amount of skill to put on and take off. Blood, mysterious fluids and goo, bits of unmentionable viscera from several species of assholes inevitably got stuck to the metal, the straps, the buckles, underneath the clasps, around the seals. If there ever was a sanity-saving need for teleportation technology, it was this, right here. _Sweetmotherofgods! Can I just please, please beam myself out of my armor!_ Or better yet, beam the shit out, if only to save the time it took to remove armor piece by disgusting piece and lay them out to be cleaned; sometimes by hand. With a toothbrush.

The worst part of it, Shepard thought, was having to keep her helmet firmly in place while shedding the rest of her armor. Because, FUCK forbid that any ground-up asshole should accidentally get into her mouth while doing it. As a result, she would be snapping off clasps, dropping off metal and struggling with straps while her head smoldered inside the suffocating containment of her helmet. _So, y_ _eah._ _Let’s fucking talk about that_ _part._

Dreading the sheer chore of it, Shepard watched as Jack went into the glass enclosure, followed by Vega, then Garrus. She brought up the rear. The worst of the grime would have to be blasted off with powerful jets of water, and the rest incinerated before they could start stripping down to their under suits. One of the hangar techs sealed them in and initiated the process. Even with only the four of them, Vega and Vakarian were so bulky they had to repeatedly shuffle into position to stop the fucking beeping. The system wouldn’t lock them in for the wash until the sensors were sure all the relevant parts were properly exposed. Isolated inside the sound-proof chamber where her students couldn’t hear her, Jack was cursing without pause from the front of the line, getting so creative she had Vega giggling helplessly behind her.

Shepard caught a glimpse of red smear on Vakarian’s chest, sides, and legs; there was a lot of blood there. Red tracks dripped down to one foot.

“Damn, Vakarian, how did you manage to get so much gross shit on you,” she asked, adding a gagging sound from the base of her throat for dramatic effect. _Turn around and look at me, you seriously weird do_ _pe_ _._ “Weren’t you supposed to be sniping, you know, from a distance?” she threw in for good measure.

“There’s an eyeball on your arm, Shepard,” he replied without turning.

There was a sharp, very un-Shepard squeal and a violent clanging of metal armor.

Followed by a burst of collective laughter. There was no eyeball on her arm.

“Fuck you, Vakarian,” Shepard muttered, calming down nonetheless. Yet another thing her adoring public did not know about Commander Fucking Shepard. Blood was okay. Any assortment of organic matter all over—that was grim but also okay. She was not squeamish.

Except for eyeballs.

This was a subject honorable warriors did not sit around campfires discussing. Not the minor phobias that you could laugh at, no. It was the strange little things that seriously freaked out even the most sturdy fighter into incoherence. Tali hated spiders, Wrex was not fond of _stairs,_ and for Shepard, it was eyeballs _._ To her defense, even in the macabre post-battle banter so critical to the sanity of active-duty soldiers, there was really no calm or respectable side to the subject of eyeballs—anyone’s eyeballs—leaving their designated places inside a skull. She just….no, there were no words. _Just. Ew._

Vakarian was still chuckling at his own prank as he planted himself in front of her, spreading his arms wide for the decon sensors. Raising her heavily-booted foot, Shepard let loose a kick to the back of his knee like an eight-year-old. She was too tired to care that the turian outweighed her 3 to 1, and that, when he stood that way, his feet were always planted so firmly on the ground. She’d probably need to set him on fire in order to get him off-balance.

“You have to stop doing that, Shepard,” Garrus said to her over his cowl. “These spurs did not evolve for decoration. You’ll break your foot.”

Shepard snorted loudly. “Could you at least not be in front of me? I’m at eye level with all the gross bits stuck to you.”

“You detonated a Cerberus engineer in front of me!” Garrus complained loudly, not just a little outraged.

“I didn’t know you were behind me!”

“Of course, I was behind you!”

The silence that followed was crisp and smoking like freshly sizzling morning bacon.

“Game, set and match,” Jack deadpanned, followed by another group chuckle at her expense.

Shepard gave Garrus another shove, albeit a less belligerent one.

“You’re welcome,” Garrus said with preening self-satisfaction. Shepard rolled her eyes. She had a retort but it was drowned out by EDI’s second decon countdown.

 _Meh,_ she thought . _It was a_ _lame comeback_ _anyway._ _At least he’s talking. Sheesh, kids today._

She was exhausted.

 


	7. Sledgehammer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Most people will get nervous when they realize they have fallen in love with their best friend. It’s just an inherently thorny situation. And then there’s Shepard._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Following your stream of consciousness is not always prudent.

That night was remembered by most of the crew as one of those rare nights on the _Normandy_ when cosmic forces agreed to just fucking chill, for once.

The emergency evacuation of Grissom Academy had gone better than expected, and they were on their way to rendezvous with _SSV Leipzig_ so the students could hop on it and be whisked away under Jack’s tender care. Shepard had another unexpectedly short discussion with Garrus about what to do with the Cerberus kid who, it turned out, would survive his injuries. He had ultimately agreed he should be turned over to Jack, exactly for the same reason she worried about—in the midst of the war, the kid could disappear in the cracks and if he was indoctrinated, he would be more dangerous.

After the evening meal, the crew started very gradually letting out the breath it had been holding, just a little. There seemed to be just enough flex in the palpable anxiety of the _Normandy_ so Dr. Chakwas and Liara marched up to Shepard’s cabin in order to physically remove her from it. If she needed to read reports, they argued, she could do it in the lounge. She didn’t have to socialize, they promised her, she could just be present. It was good for morale. _Fine_. She'd go and air herself out, like a used sock. And so she went.

Other than Shepard materializing in the lounge, two other weird things happened on this particular night.

The first thing that the crew would later remember was that it was the first time since boarding the _Normandy_ that Javik emerged from the cargo deck.

The prothean appeared in the mess hall at first, creeping everyone out with the way he slow-walked across the floor while all his eyes scanned every corner and object without a word. The crew tried not to gawk but it was not easy. It was one thing having to deal with the typical _Normandy_ shit—that just came with the territory. Bearing in mind that “typical _Normandy_ shit” would have fractured even the most jaded space soldier in the galaxy; there was very little left that could shock the crew at that point. But a living prothean was just too fucking extreme. If the unshockable crew would gawk at anything or anyone, they had to gawk at _t_ _hat._

After a few minutes, the collective nerve was stretched so taut that even Javik noticed the hushed voices around him. So, Liara decided to step in before some kind of pandemonium broke out. She decided to engage the Prothean as casually as it was civilized to do. She hoped it would help everyone relax, including Javik. So, she stuck her arm out, offering him the bag of salted nuts she was eating, as if he was the most normal creature in space who just happened to be walking by and who also happened to actually eat nuts. And definitely not fifty-fucking-thousand years old.

To everyone’s surprise, Javik stopped in front of the asari and appeared to stare her down. With one glance at the bag, he returned all his eyes on her, his jaw clenched. Then, slowly but with no hesitation, reached into the bag and plucked out one nut. The collective sigh in the mess was almost audible.

Just like that, the fifty thousand year-old prothean became just one of those typical _Normandy_ shit.

After a while, Liara made polite noises about Javik’s accommodations, and the prothean’s replies were curt but not hostile. She offered some beverages (declined) and finally, some entertainment. The prothean pinned her with a look (four, if one were counting) but acquiesced. It might help him familiarize with the humans on the ship, the asari reasoned, walking him to the lounge. There was a human strategy game called Go; it had descended unchanged over the centuries from the depths of ancient Earth history. It was standard, Alliance-endorsed entertainment and there were at least six sets scattered throughout the ship.

They joined the other crew members in the lounge where Shepard had already commandeered a couch and was reading reports from the admiralty. At the card table, Vega was sitting with Cortez and Jack; their banter growing filthier and filthier, Shepard had to threaten to make all three of them eat soap if they didn’t pipe down.

Javik fiddled with his omnitool trying to locate the game instructions, growing more irritated with “useless primitive toys”. Liara had to pull up the Go instructions herself before the prothean lost his patience and tore the implant out of his arm. This momentarily pacified him as he read through the game mechanics, making non-committal hums. After a while, he grumbled under his breath, even sounding impressed that primitive brains could concoct such a clever game.

Shepard looked up and opened her mouth to say something but a quick gesture from Liara begged her not to intervene. The prothean was, well, skittish.

Shepard shrugged and settled back on the couch to resume reading. After the _Leipzig_ turnover, the _Normandy_ would be on its way for a supply run to the Minos Wasteland. She never turned down these supply run assignments. It wasn’t just because they typically received orders for the ones that only the _Normandy_ could pull off, but also because she knew only too well how something as stupid as a shortage of socks could spell the difference between survival and annihilation. Imagine having to deploy an infantry division already limping even before any enemy encounter because they had blisters on their feet. So, she was fine with supply runs, especially the tricky ones. That night, she was waiting patiently for the inventory report from Chakwas before she could decide whether a stop at the Citadel was necessary on the way to Fortis in the Wasteland.

Vakarian entered the lounge just then, with Primarch Victus in tow. They were in the middle of their conversation. Shepard only glanced up once, and she would have been able to ignore them except she realized they were not speaking in the turian galactic standard. Whatever it was they were speaking, her translator was not picking it up. _Huh. Interesting_. They were speaking in what must be a socially isolated turian language, probably a Cipritine dialect. Otherwise, it would have been in the Codex. Garrus was from Cipritine and Victus must have come from the same area if they spoke the same dialect.

The strangeness of the untranslated turian sound had her eavesdropping shamelessly. Tuning out ambient conversation was a trick every soldier learned, living in functional communes while on active duty. She’d go insane having to overhear everyone’s banter, quarrel or gossip. But when she did not speak the language, conversations were just meaningless, rhythmic sound-making. Sometimes, that could be pleasantly isolating. She could listen without the burden of understanding, soothed by the steady beat of conversation that was uncontaminated by unwanted information. So her brain performed a graceful somersault that tuned everything else out, isolated the turian conversation and amped it.

Shepard relaxed a bit and looked up at the ceiling, drawing lazy, meandering thought-swirls in her mind.

Different people have characterized turian speech as something like syllables made from a really long harmonica, accompanied by an orchestra of other harmonicas; punctuated by clicks, low hums and vibrations. The flanging effect—sound overlaid by sound—was disorienting to humans because their brains were used to prying out discrete packets of information by clipping syllables and reassembling them into words and sentences.

Turian language was not structured this way. To her, it sounded like some form of auditory palimpsest. She’d have to peel every statement away layer by layer to understand the full nuance of its message. The amount of oversimplification in devising the turian galactic standard must have been gargantuan, she thought. On top of that, the oversimplification that was necessary in order to translate the turian standard into the common galactic standard. It made her wonder how much of the nuance had to be discarded in order to approximate the core of every turian word. Exactly how much was she missing from not knowing the language, she wondered? Diplomacy with turian politicians have so far been straightforward. Or so it seemed. Unless it really wasn’t, and she was just being yanked around. She would have to keep that in mind.

Shepard realized that what the turian face lacked in muscular plasticity, their speech made up for with auditory complexity. The sound of it, the cadence, the strangely familiar inflection with the background of sheer multi-tonal _odd_ _n_ _ess_ ; it made her feel like she was listening to music that either had no notes or too many.

Did turians have accents? Shepard wondered. Did they have the turian equivalent of a human lisp or stutter?

Come to think of it, she was, for the first time, listening to actual turian voices. She had long since learned the trick of ignoring the underlying speech and hearing only the translator overlay. Asari was particularly distracting because they had been around so long that the language was a riot of borrowed words from so many cultures. It made the asari language titter so close to the edge of familiar sounds that the brain just automatically tried to understand the words. Turian speech, on the other hand, was just strange enough that it could be easily ignored beneath the derivative sound produced by the translator. Without the overlay, she could more clearly hear their voices and, to her pleasant surprise, still differentiate between Victus and Vakarian. The translator really was doing a good job approximating the general timbre of turian voices. _Oh. That’s what he_ _really_ _sound_ _s_ _like._ Without the overlay, Vakarian sounded fuller.

Brows furrowing deeper, Shepard was stupefied by how alien and yet deeply familiar Vakarian’s actual voice sounded. It was a deep, richly resonating sound with alternating soft and round edges in layered oscillations. It gave her the strangest feeling of déja vu.

“Shepard?” Liara called in a low voice.

“Yeah?” she said, startled.

“You were scowling at the ceiling,” Liara informed her. Javik was looking at her with an unreadable expression. Or maybe he was preparing to disconnect her head in case she was possessed. Or indoctrinated.

“Oh,” she said, laying her head back. “Listening to untranslated turian.”

Liara turned to look at Vakarian and Victus, now each holding a bottle of dextro beer, but still engrossed in their conversation. “Ah,” she said. “I hadn’t noticed they were speaking in Upper Palaveni.”

“ _Elevated_ Palaveni,” Javik corrected reflexively, not really caring either way. Liara eyed his face curiously, waiting for the sarcasm and insult that usually followed. But the prothean added nothing; he had gone back to reading the rules of Go. Sometimes, Shepard understood Javik’s disdain of the asari. She did often look at the prothean as Shepard imagined an archaeologist would examine a fossilized chunk of ancient dung. And that wasn’t even entirely a metaphor in this case.

“Yes,” Liara said, turning to Shepard. “ _El_ _evated_ Palaveni, spoken by the hierarchy elite on the turian homeworld.”

While it was true that turian society was doggedly meritocratic, it didn’t mean they were functionally classless. There still formed—inevitably—the meritorious elite. _And they spoke in this elevated language, very hoity-toity,_ she thought. Now she wanted to hear the actual language spoken by the not-so-elite; learn a few hardcore insults and verbal filth to shock Vakarian with.

Huh, she thought. So Vakarian spoke this fancyass language, too. Exactly how many languages could he speak fluently by now? He already knew a significant amount of Spanish just from pestering Vega. He liked making the sounds, he’d explained to her once. Even without the necessary mouth parts, she figured there must be some other assembly in there that allowed turians to mimic unturian sounds. Garrus claimed to be not so interested in learning the language structure itself, though. He claimed it was only secondary to the fun of just making the sounds, the way differential equations were only laughably incidental to weapons design. The fun part was firing the thing but the fun only went as far as the ungodly sum of hours spent tweaking it to perfection. And, you still had to know the maths. Aaand there was the rub. Shepard was fascinated by how language influenced thinking that then looped back to influencing language. But she had no patience for actually learning languages she wasn’t forced to learn before the age of two. That left her with a grand total of one.

“Why isn’t the translator picking it up?” Shepard asked, suddenly curious.

Liara shrugged. “Probably because the turian hierarchy didn’t register it as an official language,” she said. “Or, more likely, asked the Council to block it.”

“Block it?,” Shepard asked.

“Some members of Citadel space can ask to keep certain languages….private,” Liara explained. “For various reasons—cultural, political, even military. Sometimes, the council agrees. It’s highly political and very arbitrary.”

That piqued her interest even more. It made sense for a whole host of military reasons that a civilization just entering citadel space would be paranoid. But an established one like turians, she’d bet that was just them being snobs. On second thought, that could also be turians being paranoid. She wondered if the Alliance had ever considered similar protection for one of its languages. She knew that SAI operatives were already required to learn extinct Earth languages for various purposes. As far as she knew, none was being actively blocked from study by Citadel linguists.

“I understand it,” Javik interjected matter-of-factly. “Do you wish me to translate, Commander.”

“What? No!” She was outraged, though not for the reasons Javik might have guessed. She didn’t want to lose the distance she had from the meaninglessness of it. “And stop showing off,” she added, making the prothean glower. At some point, she thought, Javik would have to come up with a better explanation for how he could just siphon information like that. That made her sneer at herself. _Someday, there might even be time for such conversations_. Another thought occurred to her.

“Javik, they know you can understand them?” she asked. 

“Yes.”

Liara smiled at that. “They’ve been doing that a lot,” she explained. “The first time it happened, the whole room fell silent. We thought they were singing.”

“Huh.”

“They were talking about nephews,” Javik added helpfully.

“We got used to it,” Liara shrugged, adding gently “You just haven’t been down here all that much.”

 _Interesting._ Then it wasn’t about keeping the meat of the conversation away from the eavesdropping public. They were probably just more comfortable with it when speaking with each other. They were both military men, after all. They knew to just be away from people and listening devices if they wanted to be confidential. Or just talk using the common galactic standard and ostensibly chat about tennis balls, no one would be the wiser.

Shepard settled back on the couch, listening to the sound that she realized she was growing very fond of. She was vaguely aware of Liara and Javik laying down the Go board, with Javik proposing various betting mechanics he only just learned by eavesdropping on the people at the card table. She was watching Vakarian and Victus openly now, somewhat mesmerized ( _where were those tones coming from, anyway?_ _What part of their actual_ _anatomy_ _made those sounds?_ ).

The Primarch was facing the view deck window, looking into space with his back to her. Vakarian was looking in the same general direction, ramrod straight with his finger tapping the beer bottle thoughtfully. They were both ridiculously tall but Vakarian was even taller than Victus. Maybe it was the age difference? She ruled that out; Victus was not significantly much older than Vakarian. Besides, she doubted turians actually stooped the way old humans did, just from the agony of being quadrupedal so recently in their comparatively shallow history. Vakarian was just really tall. _Just l_ _ook at_ _the_ _span of those limbs._ She noticed how her brain was careful to use the word “limbs” rather than “legs”. Limbs could be anything; they could have suction cups or harpoon tips. Whereas, legs had _thighs_.... _A_ nd...Well. Just the word _thigh_ tugged at her towards places she didn’t want to go. After all, she was still pissed about the eyeballs joke earlier. And the not looking at her thing.

Instead, Shepard found herself looking at Vakarian’s face; his eyes, specifically (safely in their sockets, thank you). Turian languages really did have to be multi-layered to be fully-nuanced since their faces were so fucking stiff. She realized she must be picking up some _other_ things, then; some other non-facial cues that Garrus occasionally made because she was usually fine picking up his subtexts. Turians could shift their brow plates up and down to convey everything from a subtle inquiry and skepticism to a distinct frown. But they could not roll their eyes. Nevertheless, she was sure they used them to convey meaning; even though she could only see the color of it. Victus, specifically, had wildly expressive orange eyes that screamed even when he was outwardly calm. Maybe it's the musculature around the eye sockets? Maybe the eye color dimmed and intensified. Garrus had eyes of the calmest blue, and they were bluest when he was looking straight at her. Which for some reason he was no longer doing, as previously mentioned. What the fuck was up with that anyway. Good thing she was so over him now or it w--… _W_ _ait, what?_

The thought startled her. Shepard let out an involuntary cough, and caught Vakarian’s attention as she inhaled sharply. _Now_ she had him looking at her. Suddenly, that _became_ the problem; her pulse started racing ( _P_ _russian blue,_ she thought stupidly, trying to stall her own brain. _T_ _hose eyes are_ _not cobalt blue, they are_ _P_ _russian blue dammit_ _)_.

It hit Shepard like a sledgehammer. She even thought it: _sledgehamme_ _r_ _._ She had to remind herself that she only had a vague inkling of exactly what a sledgehammer was. She assumed it was a large hammer, although she’d be hard-pressed to explain precisely what a sledge was and why it needed a special hammer (babbling inside her own head was something she immediately recognized as dangerously rising panic). What-the-fuck-ever it was, she just got hit with it ( _I’m_ _over_ _what, now_ _?_ ).

Shepard felt her brain spinning out of control inside her skull. It was finally piecing together fragments of the scattered and disconnected Garrus data in her head; she did not doubt that it slammed around in there once or twice, making her wince even harder ( _did he know?_ ). Once the idea of it was liberated at last, the cascade of other thoughts came rampaging on their own momentum. The force made her stomach surge, like it wanted to flee the room without her. _How am_ _I_ _over_ _him?_ _We were only blowing off steam_ _!_ That notion was followed immediately by another ( _I want more_ ). The last datum caught her so undefended she did not have time to press down the dry heave that it triggered. No, she could still make this work, she assured herself. She was sure no one else knew; she could still wing it. That’s it! She was still his best friend, right? She could be his _wing_ man or something. If he wouldn’t have her _that way (I want everything)_ , she sure as hell could cock-block everyone else. Best friends did that all the time! Asshole best friends. _No._

Her rapid demotion to bystander in all things Garrus sent Shepard lurching forward, stupefied and confused, arms around her own knees. _I’m too late._

There was a sudden increase in activity in the room ( _wonder what’s going on?_ _I’ll sort that out_ _later_ , _I just need a minute_ ), some shuffling of feet. She did not see him move but Garrus was no longer standing next to Victus. He was beside her. He had opened his mouth to say something but ended up just staring. There was a flash of confusion on his face, but it yielded territory immediately to concern. He reached for her and Shepard felt his touch on her back. _Warm_. _Motherfuck._ Her arms flailed, hands waving pointlessly in front of her to ward him off until one of them made contact with his other hand which—and this was to be her final undoing—grasped her fingers in that instant. Firmly.

Dinner came shooting out, landing on the floor in a pastiche of...well, projectile vomit.

Shepard took a deep breath (big mistake) but it only made her choke and sputter like a combustion engine backfiring on its last working valve.

The next fifteen seconds was a blur of mild concern (the _Normandy_ crew did not rush unless disconnected body parts were involved), slight confusion and not a small amount of giddy reverse-awe. Commander Fucking Shepard just hurled. On the floor. Like a normal person. No one knew why, but it was at least clear that she did not, in fact, puke diamonds or Alliance medals. Oh, and this happened in the presence of the Primarch of Palaven. You could _not_ make this shit up.

And that was the other weird thing that happened on the _Normandy_ that night.

Shepard realized resistance was futile, so she allowed herself to be led into the medbay, mostly because that meant being away. As her mind zoomed to hyperfocus, she decided the most important part of that idea was the fact that the medbay had a _door._ Having that door was critical to the single most important goal she had at the moment—to be on whichever side of it that everyone else ( _him_ ) was not. She even closed the door herself, as soon as she was in; slamming the control with the side of her fist while throwing assorted expletives at her shoes. They got in the way of her vomit.

Chakwas tapped the glass calmly. _Oh_ _hell and shit_. The doctor was already giving her The Look. That was a problem. That was the look that Shepard herself had ordered the entire crew never to ignore.

That meant she had to let the doctor in. The Door Mission was hopelessly lost. Worse, Garrus was standing right behind Chakwas, mandibles tight against his face. Shepard hit the door lock again in surrender. Chakwas walked in, waving her onto the gurney, followed by the turian. And the asari. And a number of humans whispering inquisitively. The prothean was all the way back, with a studiously blank look and a bright flush of copper on his otherwise stolid face. The doctor rolled her eyes and barked at all of them to clear the medbay. In this space, Chakwas was god.

To her mortification, Shepard _was_ starting to feel better; she wasn’t even heaving anymore. A little dizzy but otherwise becoming steadily more aware of the mess she had just made and, to her further horror, on the verge of tears. Shepard did not cry, it was the law.

Chakwas slapped a sensor pad on her arm. “Did you accidentally get into Tali’s crisps, Commander?” she asked, knowing it was not possible. The dextro food was stored in marked cabinets on the opposite side of the kitchen. Shepard shook her head.

“No, I didn’t think so.” Chakwas looked at her then. Shepard looked right back, mind blank. The doctor just handed her a glass of water. She took it, jumped down from the gurney and rinsed her mouth into the nearby sink. She threw Chakwas a scowl, sliding down into one of the chairs.

The doctor examined the scan results with a frown since, of course, there was nothing. Elevated pulse, blood pressure and the resulting uptick in body temperature.

“I’d test your blood but you just had your routine check this morning and you’re at least within your normal parameters,” she said. This was their inside joke. They both knew she was far from being fine and no normal person would be, under the circumstances. Keeping her within _her_ normal parameters was really the only thing either of them could do. Maybe forcing the commander out of her cabin backfired.

“If I didn’t know any better I’d say you just had a panic attack,” Chakwas said, feeling for the pulse on Shepard’s wrist. This really wasn’t even necessary anymore. But iconoclastic doctors like Chakwas still felt for their patients’ pulse this way. The contact made both doctor and patient feel better.

Shepard slumped, unable to decide whether she felt better or worse.

“I told you I didn’t want to come down here,” she mumbled petulantly.

“You’re not agoraphobic, Shepard.”

“No, but sometimes I’m leave-me-alone-phillic,” she retorted.

“Shepard,” the doctor began the prelude for the next iteration of her standard lecture about relaxation and downtime. Chakwas was about to switch from The Look to The Tone. “We talked ab--”

Shepard looked up, prepared to roll her eyes. But the doctor had stopped in mid-sentence and looked like she just finished mentally calculating the age of the universe. The concerned frown on her face had been replaced with...what, exactly? Following the other woman’s gaze, she turned around and felt another dry heave crawling up from her stomach. She caught quite a different _look_ on Vakarian’s face. He was still standing outside the medbay, looking in. At her. Not even blinking. She wanted to look away but the stillness in his eyes gathered her and held her firmly against it.

Just then, Vega came barreling through, pushing Garrus against the glass presumably on his way to the elevator. The shock of seeing a turian lose his balance broke her trance. Because, wow. Vega actually dislodged Garrus Fucking Vakarian, and shit, if that didn’t just bring her back to the crisis at hand, because: _h_ _oly fuck_ _on a bis_ _c_ _uit_ _. Did he have to be so fucking tall all the_ _fucking_ _time?_ She looked away, groaning.

“You mean Garrus?” Chakwas asked. “He’s turian, they’re all tall.”

Shepard blinked rapidly at her, swallowed and sputtered. “I said that out loud?” She hid her face in her hands. She was so utterly, irreversibly _fucked_.

Now. Chakwas was not picked for the _Normandy_ mission merely because she was a licensed field surgeon. She was there because she had the redundant distinction of being an uncommonly exceptional field surgeon. She could invent surgical techniques on the battlefield just on a whim or because all she had at the time was one toothpick. It would still find its way to becoming standard field practice because they would work and yield the best possible outcome. She was that good. She was that smart. This puzzle right here? It practically assembled itself. Waste of her time, really.

With an exaggerated sigh that stopped short of actual laughter, Chakwas reached for the door control. She gestured for the turian to come in. “She’s fine,” Chakwas told him, watching his face as he fixed Shepard with a steady, unflickering gaze. She didn’t know much about turian faces but whatever that was on _this_ turian’s face, it made her feel relieved, and rather happy. Trying to be as discreet as possible, she made a quiet exit, switching all the windows to opaque to give them privacy before stepping out, locking the medbay as she left.

The door closed behind Garrus.

“Shepard.”

Garrus’ voice sounded odd; it made her flinch. He had spoken quietly, and she heard him, sure. But she didn’t have to, not really. The displacement of air alone, as he stood there occupying that space, was enough to make her physically clench, something she did only when bracing herself against a major dressing down.

Shepard felt him move, slowly, as if to keep from startling her. She felt him drop to his knees on the floor in front of her; she could even feel him warming the air around her. It made her shudder. When she looked up at him, the look he returned was clear, fierce and unguarded. It made everything spill over at their feet.

The urge to cling-wrap hit both of them with such raw, and urgent power, neither of them had time to entertain the possibility that the other might duck. Then his arms were around her, his face buried in her hair. She realized her arms were around him, too, wrapped tightly around his waist. Before she could speak, Garrus pulled back to press his forehead gently but firmly against hers. The words dissolved on the tip of her tongue, and she lost herself in the song rising from him. He was vibrating in a hundred thousand octaves of quivering vibrato; most of it she couldn’t hear but all of it she could feel.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Palimpsest—writing material was so expensive in ancient times that people often reused parchments by erasing and writing over previous texts. Historians have had to develop methods of reading the layers of earlier writings underneath more recent ones.
> 
> *This was actually the first part of this thing that got written down. It got too long and incoherent so it had to be broken apart into chapters. It's been sitting in my HD for a long time so I figured I'd post two chapters this weekend. It's not like I have a damn schedule for this thing. Hopefully, it doesn't sound too streamy.
> 
> Thanks, Mordinette, for your patience!
> 
> For everyone still reading--wow. You're weird. Thank you! lol


	8. Leveling the Playing Field

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Now that they were in the final stages of negotiations, all either party wanted to do, really, was give away everything._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Terms of agreement, heights, flanging with four syrinxes, squawking with one larynx, and a bit of Sesame Street.

Garrus wrote the code on the fly, so she wasn’t expecting it to work on the first try, but it did. He had successfully linked her omni-tool to the skycar's system and hijacked its camera so they could use it as a projector. Voila! Human larynx projected brightly on the wall. _Damn, he’s good_ , she thought. _And skycar_ _systems_ _are_ _still_ _inherently insecure,_ _good to know_ _._

The breeze at the top of the Presidium was picking up. Garrus had to pause, and watch Shepard turn her head so it blew the hair out of her face. The texture and substance of human hair was a source of endless fascination for other species that didn’t have it. He personally couldn’t fathom why humans kept it, but he had to admit, hair _was_ glorious.

Shepard was tapping furiously on her omni-tool. Garrus let her set up while he collected their gear and put the gear bags back in the skycar. The flat wall was the perfect surface for image projection, but the ledge they were on was not that long, with the skycar already parked on it. He didn’t want them tripping over their own weapons while trying to get some perspective. And then, plummeting to their deaths.

“Don’t worry, your omni-tool is not really receiving anything,” he said, rummaging through one of the bags for a tennis ball. “It doesn’t have downlink ports open. I’ll close the uplink when we’re done.” He put the whole nut into his mouth and crushed it with his teeth. The fruit was typically deep-fried with a lot of salt, but he liked it roasted and ate it nearly all day when not on a mission.

“My hero,” Shepard said flatly, still busily tapping. But she turned her face to him without looking and batted her eyelids rapidly in mock seduction.

“I’m so turned on right now,” he deadpanned in return, closing the trunk of the vehicle. The image on the wall changed just then, replaced by a cross section illustration of the entire human neck.

“Hey, does this uplink count as a violation of one of your 137 regulations?” Shepard asked absently.

Garrus thought about it. “Hm. A total of 27 rules against hacking into the skycar system which we just did on top of the Presidium where we’re already violating the first 137. Plus discharging our weapons, that alone could be hundreds more.”

“I’m noticing a distinct lack of law enforcement.” Shepard was shuffling through a series of images, trying to pick one that would show what she wanted.

“I talked to Bailey. Didn’t want to embarrass him in case some rookie shows up, then he’d have to let us go.” He walked up next to her and watched as she flipped through various images of human viscera, growing more and more impressed with the simplicity of their anatomy. Brains were obviously universal, varying in size and shape, but on the whole sharing a similar locale.

“Any cameras up here?” Shepard asked suddenly, looking around the scaffolds above them.

“Bailey said no, I asked,” Garrus replied, chewing the last of his tennis ball. He _did_ have to ask about that one. The _Normandy_ crew had become such magnets for gossip that shore leave at the Citadel was not as relaxing as it used to be. There were vids of random sightings all over the extranet—just _Normandy_ people doing normal people things that somehow interested a certain portion of the public. There was even one of Mordin on a bench at the Presidium park, reading and holding an ice cream cone. That one trended for weeks, with the most up-voted comments focusing mainly on the salarian methodology for licking mocha ice cream while maintaining structural integrity.

“Why are you asking?,” he said, throwing her a glance with brow plates raised. “Are we going to do some canoodling? Ow!” Shepard had elbowed his unprotected side. Funny how that part of his anatomy was so conducive to assault by Shepard’s elbows.

“I don’t even want to know what turian word the translator picked that from,” she said, shaking her head. “Canoodling? Who talks like that?”

Finally, Shepard settled on a textbook illustration of the human head where the parts were easier to see.

Curious, Garrus walked to the projected image, and pointed at the lump of flesh illustrated in the picture as chunks of something green. “What’s that?”

“Sinuses. They’re not really green,” she said. “They’re part of the human immune system, but they also cushion the nasal area from impact, help regulate gas pressure inside the skull and so forth. When they are inflamed, they make our voice sound funny.”

Shepard stood beside him and leaned towards the wall. “This is the trachea, which goes down to the lungs, and that is the esophagus leading to our stomach,” she said, pointing at the parts. “That is a valve called epiglottis. It opens when we breathe and closes when we speak or eat. And that is the larynx I told you about.”

“I already showed you that trick with the paper,” she went on. “These flaps here are the vocal cords; they work the same way. Air blows through there to make them vibrate and make the sound. When we pull high notes, they stretch out and contract on low notes.”

Shepard pulled up a video and routed it through the skycar system. “This is what it looks like inside.” She started the playback. The video was taken with a camera inserted through the nose of a patient and down to the esophagus, past the pharynx and the epiglottis before descending into the larynx. It showed stretching and contraction of the vocal cords as the patient was singing the scales. Garrus watched in rapt attention.

“Humans have only one of these?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Shepard. She frowned, curious. “Why? how many _do_ you have?”

“Not the same but what we have, we have four,” he said, pressing two fingers on his throat, lower than where a human larynx would have been. “Two here and two down here in the chest cavity.”

She looked at him with something like awe. “They work the same way?”

“By pushing air through pipes to vibrate the membranes? Yes, more or less. There are also muscular filaments,” he explained. “The closest structural analogy would be the syrinx of Earth birds. The sound overlay is made by blowing air through one or several connected channels ascending from the lungs, through the same syrinx. And remember, there are four you can work with.”

Shepard’s jaw dropped. “That must be confusing.”

“The opposite. Turian words contain all the intended levels of nuance. That leaves nothing to guesswork; turians rarely misunderstand each other,” he said. “And that’s why it’s so hard to lie.” He stepped back and walked over to stand next to her, almost touching.

“Do you even have words?” Shepard asked.

“Hm, you’d call them expressions, closer to something like flavored words,” he answered. “Come on, tell me how you work just one larynx,” he added, deliberately lowering his voice.

Shepard rolled her eyes. “When you stop being so superior, I will.”

“Sorry,” he chortled, not really sorry.

“So,” she said, glancing at him to check if he was still listening (he was). “When you say the letter H, this valve stays open, the air pushes through here and out through there. You hear the air coming out but it doesn’t push through these membranes here. It’s basically just the sound of air pushing out from the lungs.”

“Much of the talking happens in the mouth, actually. The musculature here and here,” she continued, pointing at the tongue.

She turned to face him. “Now, exhale through your mouth, and try to do it a little more forcefully this time.”

Garrus exhaled loudly. So far so good.

“That is the sound of the letter by itself.”

“Yeah, I got that part,” he said. “The rest of it is a little harder to do the way you do it.”

“Try making the sounds separately. Say the H sound and then say ‘air’,” she suggested. “Hhhu-air hhhu-air. Like that. Your tongue has to curl up at the back of your mouth when you say the R, like this.”

Shepard opened her mouth to show him how her tongue curled and stiffened backwards. He had bent over, looking into the cavern of her “R” to get a better view from different angles.

“Now, keep doing that until you can kind of slide the sounds together,” she instructed.

Garrus straightened up, putting a hand on his throat to feel the word come out.

“Hhh-arrr...Hhh-arr...hhhkharrr,” he said. Shepard burst into giggles, touching her nose with the back of her hand. It was an odd gesture that made her look mean and adorable at the same time.

“You can’t even say ‘egg’ in turian,” he complained. “It’s the shortest word we have.” He tried again but when he said “hair” the way she wanted him, the “H” part came out sounding like the “ch” in Bach, only with much more air, since the sides of his tongue were not connecting with the teeth that would be the molars in a human. And he was losing the “Y” sound in the middle so that what he was really saying was “khar”.

“I can’t even do what you’re doing to that word, Garrus.” She was still laughing. He just stood back, arms crossed, watching her. He enjoyed that sound; one of the many (secret) things he could make her do. He tried several more times, making her laugh even more, her whole body shaking.

“Okay, okay, enough,” she said, reaching up to put a hand on the side of his neck. “I guess your way _is_ better. I’ll stop bugging you.”

“Hair,” he said, in perfectly enunciated English.

She looked at him in stunned silence, mouth agape. “Wow, that sounded good,” she mumbled. “You didn’t even have to really open your mouth.”

“My mouthparts aren’t even involved,” he said. “You work with the tools you have, Shepard.”

With that, Garrus started typing on his omni-tool to shut down the skycar link. He reached for her wrist and worked on her omni-tool next. She was looking up at him, watching his face, not aware that she had started to rock back and forth on her heels. She hadn’t done that since grade school. It only resurfaced when she was relaxed and daydreaming; it happened a lot around Garrus. He looked at her and put a hand on her shoulder to keep her still. When he saw the smile quivering on the corners of her lips, he went back to typing on her omni-tool while she closed her eyes and tried to stay still. _His touch is Garrus. He is mine_ _now_ _._

“There, locked and secure,” he said softly. He didn’t let go of her wrist, gently stroking her skin with his finger as his other hand wrapped around her waist to press her gently against him.

“So, we’ve got some time,” he began, absently stroking her hair. “I know you needed it to sort us out...”

Shepard took his hand as she walked towards the edge of the platform. She sat down and dangled her legs on the ledge. Garrus knew she did not like heights, but this was just the way Commander Shepard dealt with fears—she populated them. He settled next to her where he could see her face and wrap an arm around her shoulder.

Garrus scanned the area, just out of habit. C-Sec might not have cameras installed where they were, but he remembered clearly that one of the odious chores probies were required to do was to comb the entire Presidium to scan for unauthorized snoopers. They sprouted like mushrooms in unlikely spots. The Presidium could very well be the spying capital of the galaxy.

Well, everyone would have to watch this, then, he thought. He didn’t really care. If any vid ever found its way into public domain as they inevitably did, it might even make conversations easier with certain Vakarians since he wouldn’t have to bring it up when the time came. Except Solana would crush his cowl for not telling her first.

There were clouds over the Presidium, a marvel of climate control. It cost a lot of resources and some feat of engineering to manage these cloud formations but the Council was nothing if not ostentatious. Garrus only noticed them because he knew Shepard liked to watch clouds moving across the sky. Humans seemed to have this in common; theirs was a civilization still so young they hadn’t grown tired of looking up at the skies.

“So. Imprinting,” Shepard said, looping an arm around his as they sat. “Give me the long version this time.”

It was, as far as Garrus could tell, a toneless request for information. Almost, but not quite in commander mode.

“It means,” he began, searching for the most efficient summary, “I’ve found you. That’s it for me. No one follows.”

Shepard blinked at him, blank-faced.

“It doesn’t happen a lot anymore, but statistically, it is expected to still happen,” he continued. “Sometimes, when the bond between a mated pair is just right, they imprint on each other.”

Turians preferred to say there was no functional difference between any other kind of coupling, but that was not entirely true. Imprinted pairs were tethered for life, whether they married or not; although they almost always did. It was one of the exceptions to marriage dissolution laws—a married turian imprinting on someone else would be allowed to divorce their spouses in order to pair-bond with someone else. It was also the only exception to existing prohibitions against Hierarchy vaulting where someone from a lower wrung could pole-vault to a higher one if they imprinted on someone higher up, regardless of merits.

“It’s antiquated, but most turians still think of it with some degree of awe, sometimes envy,” he finished.

Shepard was lost in thought for a while. They sat there like that, neither of them saying anything as the seconds stretched and deformed away from them.

“Shit, Vakarian,” she said at last, so quietly her voice skidded almost out of his earshot, falling easily into the din of traffic below them. “Sounds like you’re stuck.” He didn’t get it at first but when it dawned on him what Shepard was thinking, he burst out laughing.

“Shep, this isn’t a bad thing,” he said.

“It sounds like a curse.”

“Only because you’re human, it’s an alien concept to you,” Garrus said, ignoring the snark. He pulled his arm from her and cupped her head with both of his hands, pressing his forehead against hers. This, he was sure she understood without doubts or equivocation.

“Shepard, there are over thirty-five billion turians throughout the galaxy,” he said, pulling back to look her in the eyes. “Most of us never find the one we are bound to. You and I are very, _very_ rare.”

Of all the reactions he was anticipating, worry over what she probably considered his loss of free will was not one of them. It was, in retrospect, a predictably human reaction. Shepard just looked at him, still skeptical.

“It couldn’t happen if I didn’t already feel it, Shepard,” he said. He turned to face her. “I just want to make sure you understand because you’ll be getting a lot of weird reactions from other turians, including the Hierarchy,” he said. “That and I know humans do not pair-bond, not the way turians do.”

Shepard considered this for a moment. “It makes us sound fundamentally uneven.”

“Does it feel that way to you?”

She let out a derisive snort almost as soon as he said it. “Fuck, no. _Now_ it feels even.”

Shepard threw him a glance that looked almost angry. “I love you, Garrus Vakarian,” she said, daring him to contradict. "The only thing that made leaving Earth bearable was knowing you were out there somewhere." There was a sharp edge to her tone. If he planned to question it, he would have to duel her for it. It was that glint of indignant umbrage that set off the flush of heat crawling up his face. He could borrow the human word “love” but it was, to him, too thin and too quiet. He pressed his forehead against hers instead, hoping she could feel the crescendo of feelings his body was singing.

“Wow, this is not like the vids at all,” he said without thinking. Shepard pulled back, and he felt a sharp pain on his nose. She’d given him a flick with her too many fingers.

“What vid? We’re having a moment here. Stop watching those vids!” she said, glaring. She was irritated, but he was laughing, holding both her wrists to protect his face from more flicking.

“There’s no manual for us, Shepard,” he said, suddenly serious. “We’re going to have to blaze all the trails here. People won’t know what to do with us.”

“That’s not our problem, Garrus.”

Shepard wiggled out of his grip and reached out to run her fingertips on the side of his neck, feeling the texture of the scaled spots that dotted his skin there. They had become impossible to miss; solid black made even more stark by the contrast of his skin and his colony markings. They were most visible closest to his fringe where the scaled spots were large and looked embossed on his skin. The sheen of it was actually quite stunning, she thought, especially when Garrus stood in the sun. Any sun. She felt him shudder as she stroked the side of his neck. She shifted her gaze to his face. He was holding his breath, struggling to not get aroused.

“What would have happened if Thane had not been there with you on Omega?” she asked.

Garrus felt dread reaching down his spine. That truly could have been anywhere from merely awkward to downright disastrous.

“I left for Cipritine the following day, so someone else would have noticed eventually,” he replied. “If I were lucky, it would have been some random stranger on the public tram. If not, my father would have noticed. Either way, it could only have been someone who didn’t know me or you. I’m glad it was Thane.”

“And the mating call?”

Shepard didn’t think turians could contort into a shape and produce a look that could be described as “sheepish”, but Garrus somehow managed it. “Hair-trigger,” he said. “I was on a mission to send you that tape, so I was already suffused with thoughts of you for days.” Weeks, months, and even years, when it came down to it.

“Suffused,” she repeated.

“Suffused,” he confirmed proudly. The memory made him sit up, straightening his back. “I think Thane knew more about imprinting than I did at that point.”

“I wondered about that,” Shepard agreed. “Why do you think he knows so much about it?”

“The man has a long history, Shepard,” Garrus replied, completely convinced he did not want to know what an assassin was doing with such detailed information about turian pair-bonding. On top of it, Krios even knew to make sure he didn’t show up reeking of alcohol when he went to see Shepard’s mother. So he made him turian tea. _Spirits. That drell was terrifying on so many levels._

Shepard was lost in her own thoughts, wondering what Garrus’ father would do. She realized she knew nothing about Castis Vakarian, other than he didn’t get along with his son until the Reapers showed up.

“What is it called, again? In fancy Palaveni?” she asked.

“ _K_ _r_ _utr r’_ _a_ _ch_ ,” he said. The sound came from somewhere deep at the back of his throat and the hard surface on the roof of his mouth at the same time. It combined with a tail-end of a short sing-song vibration in his chest that she was actually able to hear. Turian words never seemed to reach their actual mouths.

“That means ‘special spots’?” she asked, the corner of her lips curving a little.

“It means ‘super special spots that belong to only one person,’ ” he replied. “And then some. It also says ‘fuck off.’ ”

Shepard didn’t say anything; she just kept feeling the marks with the tips of her fingers. But she understood it; it wasn’t a novel idea even on Earth. Pair bonding was fairly common; among non-human animals, anyway. From primates to whales, birds and rodents, some species mated for life. Humans didn’t, but throughout its history, various cultures had imposed monogamous mating as well, although not always cleanly. Humans did it mostly by forcing compliance under threat of violence or ostracism even when it no longer made economic, political, or even social sense. The blowback against the fierceness of the convention might actually explain their perceived promiscuity, since humans did not have the thousand-year lifespans that asari had to explain it.

“When I first noticed them, I thought you were sick. Illness or stress or something.” Shepard sat back.

“What are you talking about, I _was_ stressed!” he protested. “You only hear about this thing happening to faraway people; you never actually see it, you never really consider it happening to you.”

“At least you weren’t puking all over Adrien,” she smirked.

“I could still do,” Garrus chuckled.

Shepard leaned forward, elbows on her knees. Garrus knew she was playing out scenarios in her head, mapping out the hazards and dead ends she was trying to anticipate. He could not help the smug sense of pride that he knew this about her; that she felt safe enough to let him see the moments when she didn’t know what to do or what to think.

“My mom didn’t notice?” she asked.

“Thane covered it pretty well,” he said. “I think your mother was more dubious about the idea of sneaking anything through Alliance security.”

“She didn’t,” Shepard answered with a chuckle. Captain Hannah Shepard was not one to sneak anything anywhere. What she actually did was march right up to Anderson and slam the cassette tape on the table. Then she stared him down, and demanded that he did whatever it took to make sure her daughter received it.

“Wow, and I didn’t think she would even take it,” Garrus said thoughtfully. It turned out he wasn’t as good at reading human facial expressions as he’d thought. Or, more probably, Capt. Shepard was just that opaque. Because she barely said anything to him. She just looked at him like he was a flea.

“She told Anderson my ‘boyfriend’ came to see her,” Shepard said, gesturing with finger quotes. “Then she moved mountains to make sure I got it.”

“She said she moved mountains?”

“Well, no, but that’s what she would have had to do.”

Garrus paused to think about it.

“She used the same expression with me. She specifically asked how many mountains I had to move; first, to get the equipment, then the tape, and finally, to find her so I could convince her to get it to you,” he said.

“Do mountains typically crawl around on Earth, Shepard?” he added as an afterthought.

“Plate tectonics,” she explained flatly. He chuckled.

“She said 'boyfriend'? How do you think she found out about us?” Capt. Shepard referring to him as Shepard's 'boyfriend' made him inordinately nervous.

“Mothers always know, Garrus.”

Garrus sighed at that, wondering if fathers could tell, too.

“So, how much shit are you going to get for pair-bonding with an alien?” she asked, genuine concern tainting her face.

“It’s not something we switch on and off at will, Shepard,” he replied. “I’m not going to be punished or shamed for it. But you, though, being human…”

“Sluts, the lot of us,” she said with a wry smile. “Even when we’re not being polygamous, we’re still serial monogamists—all that bed-hopping. Where do we even find the time for eating, building armies, killing reapers and such.”

Then, with a suddenness that made him light-headed, Shepard’s face shifted completely. All her uncertainties had been summarily dismissed. Gone. She had decided not to give a fuck. _Spirits, this little human_. It was like being inside a centrifuge.

“How did your people even get to thirty-five billion if pair-bonding was so rare?” she asked finally. Her interest now sounded purely academic.

“Society adjusted,” he said, flexing his shoulders. “We typically mate for life but that’s just convention at this point.”

“Garrus?”

“What?”

“Did you just shrug?”

Garrus shifted his brow plates in a slight frown—there wasn’t a lot of movement there; it involved a single solid plate, after all. But that plate went up and down. It was the one thing turians and humans had in common: the ability to affect a frown. They frowned like no other species in the vast spread of the galaxy. Not even the asari could frown. The vorcha, batarians and salarians had too much happening on their foreheads, they couldn’t really pull it off. If quarians frowned, no one could see them. According to Tali, there was no frowning in the quarian culture but that could be bullshit. They could all be cross-eyed and no one would know. The krogan didn’t count; they were made entirely of _frownicules_. The yahg probably frowned by slamming their lungs together, but it didn’t count if it wasn’t happening on the forehead, as far as he was concerned. So he just kept _his_ frown and rotated both his shoulders. _Huh._ That, apparently, was a shrug. He _must_ have shrugged, since he clearly could do it, carapace and all. How about that. The thought made his mandibles open in a self-satisfied grin. Shepard was chuckling.

“What are you doing to me, woman,” he groaned in mock agony, still grinning and rolling his shoulders up and down as far as his frame could allow. Shrugging wasn’t a turian thing, but neither were rings, and he already had one in his pocket.

Grinning, Shepard got up from the ledge then and looked down at him. Garrus took both of her hands and made space for her to sit between his legs where she tucked herself in, his arms wrapping around her. It was a small series of movements executed with seamless ease that intimated practice. They were two impossibly disparate creatures that did not look like they should fit together—all spurs, elbows, and lose hairs with both tender and bony parts—yet managed to maneuver a space where she could be cocooned in her turian, and he could wrap around his human.

“I hate heights, but look at me perch on top of the Presidium like a nesting harpy,” she grumbled with a contented sigh. “And you’re complaining about shrugging.”

“I could break my spine,” he returned lazily, resting his chin on top of her head.

“From shrugging.”

“Uh-huh.”

They were quiet for a while, the echo of rush hour traffic rising up from below and blending with the gentle undulations of the swirling breeze. This was one of the spots on the Citadel where one could hear the low hum of life and machinery softly wafting in rhythmic waves. Garrus had once explained how the sounds overlaid each other as they bounced off of the acoustic surfaces of the Citadel’s stretched out arms. The colliding waves produced a soft pulsing beat that sometimes rose to a ululating crescendo when the winds were high. She found it soothing, but it was nothing compared with the low vibrations coming from Garrus’ chest. Even right against her ear, she knew she wasn’t hearing all of it. But she felt it, she could wrap herself in it, layered underneath his enveloping warmth.

They watched as the wards slowly lit up. The Citadel had begun slipping into its night cycle. It would be too cold for them soon, but neither wanted to move a muscle.

“What happens if one of them dies?” There was an edge to Shepard’s voice that made him hold her tighter against him. Trust her to blithely bring up the sharpest tip of any subject and stab people with it. But he was expecting the question. It made him wince, anyway—from the mere idea of separation. He had a joke about tossing the surviving spouse into the cremation pyre of the dead one, but he snuffed that out quickly. She wasn’t concerned about herself in case he died; she worried about him in case she did.

“There’s no protocol or anything,” he explained, gripping her hands a little tighter. “Sometimes, pair-bonded widows would seek each other out. It’s a way to be with someone else while expecting nothing.”

“Usually, people just live the rest of their lives like everyone else,” he concluded. He hoped he didn’t sound too indifferent. He knew this would not be their last conversation about the subject, but he didn’t want either of them to miss the breadth and depth of what lay ahead. Out of respect, he resolutely quelled the urge to couch anything in soft, carefully-selected words. Still, it did not need pointing out that Death was a member of their crew.

Shepard did not say anything, but the ball of her thumb was stroking his hand, a minuscule rhythm that struck him as both intimate and possessive. They were silent again for a while.

The Citadel was dark now, but for all the marvels of technology that civilizations have built over thousands of years, no one had managed to come up with a good way to mute the pollution of lights that blocked the stars at night. Garrus could only see a few when he looked beyond the wards. Below them, though, was a different matter. The riot of blinking colors took his breath, their heavy concentration outlining the shape of the Citadel arms against the stark blackness of the space beyond.

“Garrus.”

“Hm?”

“Say the word again.”

Garrus let out a chuckle. “ _K_ _r_ _utr r’_ _a_ _ch_ ,” he said.

Shepard lifted her head from his chest. “That actually translates into something, you know.”

“It should, it’s the same expression in all turian languages.” He shrugged as if it was the most obvious thing. “Some linguistic dreg is bound to stick to it."

“Sure, but ‘harpoon mating’? A little heavy-handed, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, about that.” He reached into one of his pockets and held up the ring, giving her a gentle squeeze, and brushing his face against her hair.

Shepard was speechless for a heartbeat, looking momentarily dislodged. Her mouth opened to say something, but she snapped it shut. She was staring at the ring so hard, Garrus thought it could have melted the metal. Slowly, she looked up at him and held up her hand, watching him slip the ring on her finger. Her mouth trembled a bit. Then, her large, explosive laughter escaped into the winds. His own grin was wide; he was almost certain that someone below must have caught that sound, and wondered where it had come from; maybe even feel some of the untroubled joy it carried with it.

-fin-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it, folks. Thank you for staying with it all the way to here. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts! 
> 
> Mordinette was my ever-patient beta-reader but last-minute edits and my obstinacy definitely left errors all over--they're all mine.


	9. Epilogue: C120

“It’s really just music?”

“Side B has some poetry, sir.”

Colonel Kidd rubbed her face with her hands. Poetry. _Jesus wept_.

“Is it any good?” she asked, bewildered.

James Vega thought about this for a bit.

“The krogan stuff is a little weird, sir” he said finally.

“There’s krogan stuff.”

“Yes, sir.”

She had been relieved when the hacking attempts finally stopped. Someone very adept was trying for weeks to spoof security authorization to give Commander Shepard extranet access. First, at the JAG in London, and then at the Sao Paolo facility where she was originally confined, supposedly in secret. That forced their hand, and Shepard had to be moved again, this time to another heavily-secured facility known only as Building J right inside the Alliance headquarters.

The respite did not last long. A week later, a cheese cake had arrived—on her desk, with no one able to explain to her how it got there. She had to trigger a security breach alert as armored personnel poked gingerly at the cardboard sign that said “For Commander Shepard”. The cake was inside a box wrapped in some soft, gauzy material with pictures of flying cranes that the bomb disposal unit assured her were _hand-painted_ on it. There was also a datapad with a set of instructions, and the source code for a scanning application. It was signed by one Talisara von Normandy Something-or-Other; giving terse directions on how to calibrate their equipment so the scans would not “destroy the flavor and consistency” of the cake. It really _was_ just cake, but the amount of paperwork the incident generated was staggering. Fucking _Normandy_ crew.

“Captain Shepard brought it in?” she asked finally, turning the cassette over and raising it towards the light, trying to spot anything that she knew she would not recognize anyway.

“Yes, sir,” Vega said, swiping a finger on his datapad to pull up the supporting documentation. “Admiral Anderson said it was personally handed to the captain by Adviser Garrus Vakarian. Sounds pretty high up in the Hierarchy.”

Col. Kidd sighed, softly tapping the cassette on the table.

“SAI ran it through everything they had, sir,” the lieutenant said helpfully. “Brass cleared it but said it’s up to you.”

The colonel rolled her eyes so hard she was afraid they’d get stuck at the back of her skull.

“Fine,” she said, grabbing the datapad from Vega. She pressed her palm on it. “Let her have it.”

 

 

\- - - -

To: Col. R.P. Kidd

Building J

London

RE: Personal Provisions, AI NKY-7609-3332

Contents:

Toiletries (See App. 23-A)

  * 4 Pcs Standard Regulation Shirt (S, Pln Wht)
  * 4 Pcs Standard Regulation Trousers (S, Pln Blk)
  * Reading materials (See App. 27-B)
  * C120 Compact Cassette Tape, audio only (See App. C5, SAI 41 attached)



App. C5

One (1) C120 Compact Cassette Tape, Table of Contents (list provided, verified)(a)

 

Side A

  * "Die for the Cause" (Exercitus Philharmonic Orchestra, Turian Imperial Anthem)
  * "Fire in the Courtyard" (soundtrack, Fleet and Flotilla)
  * “Moon Over Palaven” (Symphony #6, Ticun Krysae, Iratiana Philharmonic Orchestra)
  * “Sweet Number Six” (Dramaxeens, Live Concert, Thessia)
  * “Sky” (Men of Menae, a capella)
  * "Bang Bang Boom" (Club Kicks, dance mix)
  * “Star Spray” (Starless, soundtrack)
  * “Mehaz Hamiz” (Arnus Munk, “Chants and Meditations”, bootleg album)
  * “Heads at My Feet” (Arnus Munk, “Chants and Meditations”, bootleg album)
  * “Enkindle THIS” (Blasto: The Jellyfish Stings, soundtrack)
  * “Hurt Me Deeper" (Best of Expel 10, dance mix)
  * “Blue Azure" (Vaenia, soundtrack)
  * “Ice Alert” (Dramaxeens, acoustic bootleg)



 Side B

  * “Dennis the Constitutional Peasant” (Monty Python, audio excerpt)
  * “Sharp as Nail” (Domino Masque, extended play)
  * “Nails on the Wall” (Domino Masque, solo)
  * “Where You Gone” (Lady Sweet, Best of)
  * “Two Varrens” (Dramaxeens, studio rehearsal, bootleg)
  * “Mode Light Memory” (Bootyherax, sing-along version)
  * “Thessia” (Expel 10, serenade)
  * “O Fortuna” (Carmina Burana, Carl Orff; live concert Krogan Infantry Hammer Choir)(b) 
  * “Kashmir” (Led Zeppelin, live concert remastered)
  * “I Miss You” (Best of Blink 182)
  * “You Darkness” (reading, poem by Rainer Maria Rilke)(c)



 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a.) All acts in this playlist are either real or canon, except for #1, 3, 8 and 9 on Side A and #8 on Side B. Of the bands and acts I made up, the one I really wish was real is the Krogan Infantry Hammer Choir. Imagine a krogan choir performing _O Fortuna._ Now, imagine a krogan hammer choir performing _O Fortuna._
> 
> b.) No, “hammer choir” is not a thing; I made that up, too. But it sounded like something the krogan would come up with because _krogan._
> 
> c.) "O Fortuna": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFSK0ogeg4
> 
> d.) Yep, that was Garrus reading it for Shepard
> 
>  
> 
>    
> Thanks for reading.


	10. Post Epilogue: Escaping the Medbay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If people were characters in a play, the curtain would conveniently fall at critical moments when the point has been made and we are left to imagine the rest. But, really, most of the stuff in between are made entirely of outtakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like C120, this is a stray bit I couldn't find a spot for. But it's all written down so it might as well go here. Think of it as a post-credit Marvel thing. Last one, promise.

Okay, eighteen minutes. Twenty had to be where it would ease up a little. Shepard was finding it harder to keep from laughing. She knew the corners of her mouth were trembling, and there was no spot left on either thigh for her to pinch just to keep her face straight. _It shouldn’t be funny!_

Garrus was sitting on the chair now, his face in his hands. She was on the floor at his feet, her legs crossed. She wanted very badly to touch him. But they needed to get out of the medbay. To do that, he would have to be a little quieter. Except, if she touched him, she suspected the contact could set off an entirely new symphony, just as the second one was winding down to an adagio that, if she were smart, they could have taken advantage of. He raised his head to look at her with a slightly embarrassed expression in his eyes. _Oh, Garrus, you are so totally mine._

“Still can’t talk, huh,” she said, trying to look serious.

Garrus shook his head.

“So, traditionally speaking, should I be doing something?” Shepard asked, moving a little closer. His mandibles fluttered. Then he waved his arms in long sweeping motions.

“Dance?” she asked, suspicious. Garrus couldn’t hold it; but his chuckle was lost in the tones he was making.

“Fuck you, Vakarian.” At that, Garrus nodded almost violently and made a lewd gesture--an instruction, really, on how she was supposed to position herself. She laughed. The sound of it made him louder. But it was the burst of musk that emanated from her that made him nearly lose what little control he had left. 

Sighing loudly, Shepard stood up and looked around. The Cerberus kid was lying motionless on the bed at the end of the room, tethered to the respirator. There was nothing they could use to—well, muffle Garrus.

“Thing is,” she said, looking down at him. “I want us in my cabin.” He took her hands in his and nuzzled them with his mouth.

 _Screw it_.

Shepard lunged forward and wrapped herself around his neck. His arms went around her eagerly. He tried to say something but it disappeared inside another wave of dulcet tones. He held her tighter.

Garrus was entirely unprepared for how long the singing would be out of his control. He wanted to press his forehead to hers again; he ached for it. But she wouldn’t let go, either, no longer laughing. They stayed that way, her arms tight around his neck, her face buried inside his cowl.

“I could stay here and feel this way forever, Garrus, but we have to surrender the medbay,” she said softly into his neck. She felt him nod but didn’t let go. He started taking deep breaths, trying to bring the throat-song down to a quieter hum. The room-filling sound softened slightly, ebbing far enough for them to finally notice the steady beeping of the respirator.

“Okay, for real now,” she said again, planting a wet, aggressive kiss on the side of his neck that she could reach. “Vakarian, we have to do this.” Vigorous nodding.

But when he felt Shepard relax her grip, Garrus grabbed her head, finally pressing their foreheads together. She let out a quiet chuckle, and a sigh that she couldn’t help. That got him starting all over again—a deep, ululating hum in all the registers she could only feel as vibrations, and the loud alternating layers of notes that, when she heard them, made her smile.

“Still can’t talk?” she asked, pulling back just enough to be able to look at his face. He shook his head, running a hand up and down his neck and chest, as if it should be obvious.

Shepard finally disengaged, resolved to get them both out of the medbay without attracting the entire crew to what would probably sound like a full-blown turian concert. Mainly, they had to sneak to her cabin without alerting the primarch. He’d been through enough. It was doubtful he’d even seen human puke before.

“EDI,” she called out. Alarmed, Garrus looked up, eyes large. _What are you doing_ , said the look on his face.

Shepard raised a finger, signaling him not to worry.

“Shepard,” EDI replied. She sounded suspiciously neutral.

“EDI, can you make sure we don’t encounter anyone alive while we hightail back to my cabin?”

“Certainly, Shepard.”

“Attention, crew,” EDI said over the ship-wide comm. “I will be testing area isolation protocols presently. All lock settings will be engaged to measure ship-wide response time. This exercise will last exactly 37 seconds.” With that, the door to the medbay unlocked and opened. The windows were also switched back to open view. They heard the faint echo of all other doors closing and locking. The corridor lights dimmed to an eerie purple, but the respirator in the medbay continued to bleep steadily and without interruption.

Garrus and Shepard exchanged a look. In the next instant, they were both running for the elevator. As the door closed, EDI announced that the tests have been completed, all doors restored to previous settings and the crew could now, please, resume their activities.

Finally, she could laugh. But Garrus’ tongue was now in her mouth. She, of course, took it.


End file.
